The Chief Minister has initiated measures to clean up the village and ward secretariat system, which was set up by previous YS Jaganmohan Reddy regime, but allegedly misused it more as party cadre, than optimum utilization of human resources to extend quality public services.
The Chief Minister has already issued instructions to formulate an action plan for utilization of their services more effectively. As a result key changes are likely to be introduced in the system very soon. Some staff will be handed over to the Urban Development Department. The government has focused on the system of village and ward secretariats.
Chief Minister Chandrababu has made key proposals on this issue. He opined that the YCP government, which had set up the secretariat system, failed to make good use of human resources. It was concluded that this system must be cleaned as tens of employees are appointed in the villages, but they do not have a job chart and there is a lot of work pressure for some, and others do not have real work.
Proposals were made to keep ANM, VRO, digital assistant, welfare secretary and women welfare secretaries in the villages and hand over the rest to their parent organizations. One of them will be appointed as DDO. Similarly, admin, education assistant, welfare secretary, sanitation, ANM and women welfare secretaries will be kept in the ward secretariats and the rest will be handed over to the municipal and urban development department.
It seems that plans have been made to abolish the posts of Engineering Assistant, Agriculture/Horticulture Assistants, Village Surveyor Assistant, Animal Husbandry Assistants etc. and keep them under the control of the parent department under the cluster system.
Panchayat Secretaries will be restricted to Gram Panchayats under Panchayat Raj. About 1.26 lakh secretaries are working in 10,960 village secretariats and 4,044 ward secretariats in the state. It is said that by keeping the five or six secretaries required for the village and ward secretariats and sending the rest to the respective parent organizations will be helped for the respective departments to be strengthened. These secretariats will be designed to serve as mini mandals and mini municipalities.