BANGALORE: The Government has decided against filling over 74,000 vacancies in various departments to save public funds for development and also to rightsize the administration.

Of the 89,469 vacant posts in various grades, the Finance Department has decided against recruiting personnel to 74,438 posts. It has given clearance to fill only 15,031 vacancies in 12 departments in order to cut down expenditure on salaries and allocate more funds for development works, sources in the Secretariat said.

The Karnataka Administrative Reforms Commission headed by the former Law Minister and Congress leader Harnahalli Ramaswamy, in a report submitted to the S.M. Krishna government in 2001, strongly emphasised "rightsizing of the administration rather than downsizing." The Medium Term Fiscal Plan of the State for 2006-10 too favoured continuing the freeze on recruitment, except in a few departments such as Health, Education and Police.

As a result of administrative reforms, salary payments as a ratio of revenue expenditure has come down from 30.4 per cent in 1999-2000 to 21.7 per cent in 2005-06. The budgetary estimate for salaries in 2006-07 is Rs. 7,186 crore. Currently there are about 5.3 lakh government employees.

The Government has laid emphasis on rightsizing the administration by introducing a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS). But the scheme has received poor response with only 375 employees opting for it. In public sector undertakings, 7,302 employees have opted for the VRS since 2001, sources in the Finance Department told The Hindu .

The Finance Department has given clearance to recruit personnel for 15,031 posts in 12 departments, including courts, which come under the jurisdiction of the High Court.

On August 18, Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy announced that Government would fill 13,000 teacher vacancies in various primary schools in the current year. Health Minister R. Ashok had recently said that his department had initiated steps to recruit 500 doctors.

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