Recent Human Resource Initiatives

Recent Human Resource Initiatives

1. Town Hall Meetings:  In an endeavour to establish a two-way communication channel between Staff Wing at Headquarters and the stakeholders at field offices, Town Hall meetings in different locations across India was initiated. Three Town Meetings at Bengaluru, Raipur & Tripura has already been held and the next Town Hall meeting is planned to be held at Srinagar very soon.  Issues/grievances/suggestions of the stakeholders received during these meetings were duly examined.  Some issues where action has already been taken include:  

• enhancement of charge allowance from Rs.2500/- to Rs.4500/-  for entrustment of charge as SAO,
• removal of age limit for nomination of training at IIMs,
• induction training to promoted supervisors,
• Issuing of instructions to State Governments to not make IAAD staff witnesses in court cases and for not letting investigating agencies etc. summon them. 
• Field inspection by DG (HQ) to resolve office infrastructure related issues of field offices.
• A committee comprising of veteran sports persons of various disciplines in IA&AD and senior officers has been constituted to review existing Sports Quota Recruitment policy to attract best talent.

2. Compassionate Appointment policy:  In order to implement the Compassionate Appointment Scheme, in both letter and spirit, a centralized platform at Headquarters has been established for matching vacancies with applications.  A Compassionate Appointment cell at Headquarters was constituted to facilitate identification of vacancy positions on Compassionate Appointment across IA &AD and utilize the vacancies by appointing deserving and willing applicants of Compassionate Appointments to maximum possible extent.  In panel year 2022, thirteen such posts have been identified by this Cell and letters have been issued to the field offices for taking further action on appointment.

3. Training: To strengthen the quality of training and capacity building, following measures have been taken:

1. To address the issue of getting quality faculties at CTIs/RTIs/RTCs, honorarium rates for guest faculties for delivering lectures have been enhanced substantially.   
2. In order to provide necessary IT support to the training institutes, Training Division has recently taken the initiative of providing Adobe Captivate Licenses to RTIs/RTCs (two each) for developing/ conversion of e-Learning content for hosting on Learning Management system.

4. E-Learning Module on 'Prevention of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace: An e-Learning Module on 'Prevention of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace', which is a self -learning module, has been prepared by iCISA and has been hosted on the SAI Training Portal.
5. Capacity Building in AI and ML:  With the objective of continuous capacity building of human resources especially in the area of cutting-edge IT technologies, a three-day training programme on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Leaning (ML) for 20 IA & AS officers was conducted at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore in December

2022. Further, for dissemination of the knowledge acquired from the training, a lecture by the participants of the said training was organized in C&AG office.

6. Scheme for permanent absorption as AAO:  In order to address the incongruence between the pan-India and office-wise number of vacancies in the AAO cadre and the availability of SAS passed candidates, in August 2022 CAG approved a scheme for permanent absorption in deficit offices of SAS passed candidates of surplus offices awaiting regular promotion.  Under this scheme permanent absorption of SAS passed candidates awaiting promotion to AAO in respect of A&E offices have been completed.
7. Review of EDP Cadre: The EDP cadre was introduced in the early 1990s when the CAG organization had made nascent efforts to computerize operations in the A&E offices. Almost three decades have passed since then and a need has been felt for a comprehensive review of the EDP cadre.  A committee was constituted by CAG in 2022 to review the EDP cadre. The Committee submitted its report and C&AG has ‘in principle’ accepted the recommendations of the committee on rationalization of sanctioned strength of EDP cadre. Implementation of the recommendations is under process for which a committee under the chairmanship of ADAI (Staff) has been constituted.  
8. Framework for assessing administration and financial management: CAG has approved a multi parameter framework to assess the efficient functioning of offices in administrative and financial management matters. From 2023, each office is to carry out a self-assessment on a half-yearly basis and share their self-assessment report with Headquarters. We expect that this would facilitate comprehensive and effective monitoring of all crucial and essential administrative systems.  The Inspection & Peer Review wing will verify these reports during their inspection.
9. Review of SAS Exams: The CAG of India has approved the revised Exam syllabus, papers & the pattern of questions of the SAS Examination.  The new exam papers and syllabus shall be applicable from SAS Exam II of 2024, affording adequate preparatory time to all stakeholders - Exam Wing, Training Wing and employees.  The new exam pattern will be largely based on case studies involving application of knowledge, rather than based on rote learning.  The number of branches of exams have been rationalized from 7 to 6 branches combining Civil Audit and Local Audit, and the number of papers has been reduced from 27 to 20 with focus on core auditing and accounting skills.  A candidate has to pass 8 papers in 2 groups of 4 papers each.  Three out of the four papers in Group-I are common to all branches.