LAHORE: The Punjab government has decided in principle to regularise all the 222 senior and junior employees of the Social Welfare and Bait-ul-Maal (SW&BM) Punjab who went into litigation and subsequently won their cases from higher courts.

A senior bureaucrat privy to the development told Business Recorder on Friday that the Cabinet Committee which held under the chair of Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar at the Civil Secretariat on Thursday accorded nod to regularise all the 222 officers and officials of the SW&BM Punjab.

A few years ago, he disclosed, these officials had approached the Lahore High Court (LHC) and subsequently the Supreme Court seeking restoration and regularisation of their jobs after their projects and contracts expired.

He said both the courts ruled in favour of the petitioners and directed the Punjab government to reappoint them instead of advertising new vacancies. As per the 2014 recruitment policy of the Services and General Administration Department (S&GAD), the government cannot reappoint officers on senior grades without holding a competitive exam competition between them, he added. Similarly, he said, the junior officials cannot be reappointed without the clearance of the concerned department’s board.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021