The circular, which was issued in the first week of December 2016, has come as a major relief for officials who were routinely victimised and experienced problems in promotions because of the warnings that were issued to them by their seniors and which were later used to deny them promotions.
As per the circular, which was issued by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions Department of Personnel & Training, in July 2008 and was “reiterated” again on 6 December 2016 for “strict compliance”, states that “Warning, letter of caution, reprimands or advisories administered to government servants do not amount to a penalty and, therefore, will not constitute a bar for consideration of such government servants for promotion.”
The circular further goes on to say that “a warning is administered by any authority superior to a government employee in the event of minor lapses like negligence, carelessness, lack of thoroughness, delay etc. It is an administrative device in the hands of superior authorities for cautioning government employees with a view to toning up efficiency and maintaining discipline.”
According to officials, in recent years, there have been an increasing number of instances where administrative warnings were used as a pretext to stop promotions of employees by superior officials or political bosses.
“Administrative warning is not recognised as a penalty, but still we were witnessing many instances where a deserved promotion was denied because the official concerned was served ‘warning’ by his senior officer. However, ‘warning’ is the basic administrative tool to regulate the working of officials and it in no way can be made a parameter to deny promotions. To deal with serious lapses, we have the necessary system in place for which there are a set of procedures that needs to be followed. We had come across instances where a junior officer was forced to do something which ideally he should not have because of the threat of ‘warning’ being issued against him by his bosses which then would have hampered his growth in the future. The fact that the government was forced to ‘bring back’ the circular to remind the officials not to misuse warnings shows how it was being misused,” a director level official with the Ministry of Defence said.
The circular has further asked “all the disciplinary authorities in ministries/departments to keep in view the above guidelines while dealing with disciplinary cases against government servants”.