Kathmandu, December 26

Chairman of the Public Service Commission Umesh Mainali and a PSC member, Ashok Kumar Jha, said they were upset by the arguments made against the autonomy of PSC in the State Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, where the bill to amend and integrate Public Service Commission is being discussed.

Mainali said the phraseology used in the bill did not ensure financial autonomy which the PSC hitherto enjoyed. “If we exceed the budget ceiling, it may be right to argue that we need to seek approval from the government. But why can’t we spend money from the available budget without seeking the government’s permission?” he wondered.

Mainali said the constitution treated PSC as an autonomous body on par with other autonomous bodies, such as National Human Rights Commission, Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority and Auditor General’s Office.

“Certain expenditures made by constitutional bodies should be non-votable items and the same should happen in the matters of our expenditure,” Mainali said.

Jha said financial autonomy was vital for PSC as it was going to introduce modern and comprehensive programmes to conduct written examination and interviews for civil service job aspirants.

He said the PSC wanted to use Assessment Centre Methodology to select civil servants for which it would need huge resources. “We need to go for ACM to select best suited personnel for government jobs because existing methods of selecting government personnel are not up to the mark,” Jha said. He added that some people were trying to dissuade the stakeholders from going for ACM.

PSC has used a few components of ACM in the selection of a few under-secretaries and joint-secretaries and in the National Investigation Department. ACM includes simulation and psychological tests. “PSC wants to record interviews and other examination which hitherto have not been recorded. Once we record the presentation of the interviewee, we can submit the record to the court when an issue is raised questioning fairness and neutrality of the interviewers,” he added.

Mainali said lawmakers discussing the PSC bill must ensure that the PSC enjoyed administrative autonomy too. “The government needs to ensure that civil servants who work in sensitive departments of PSC are not transferred without PSC’s permission,” Mainali said. He added that if all the personnel working in sensitive departments were transferred, then the PSC could not do its job.

PSC’s permission before transferring employees is a must because it takes months to do certain technical jobs. “If any technical employee is transferred without PSC’s permission, then the constitutional body will have to spend months training a new employee again,” Jha said.