Bangladesh govt looks for ways for easy termination of employees: Report

Dhaka: Bangladesh’s interim government is looking for legal options to easily terminate or sack its employees leading to panic among officials here, Prothom Alo newspaper reported on Wednesday.

“The interim government is going to restore some sections of an over four and half decade old law to come down heavily on government service holders,” the report said, quoting unnamed people.

The initiative was taken mainly to debar them from street meetings, work stoppage, sit-in campaigns and obstructing fellow employees alongside halt protests inside Bangladesh Secretariat, the heart of the country’s administration, it said.

The Prothom Alo quoted a source in the Public Administration Ministry saying that since the ouster of prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League regime in student-led protests on August 5 last year, the bureaucracy has continued to witness unrest.

“After the political changeover, several employees of some civil service cadres, including police, administration and education, went into hiding. Some fled abroad. Many remained absent in workplaces without permission or declined to show allegiance to the government.

“Other employees are being instigated to remain absent in workplaces,” the report said quoting the source.

Under the planned law, the government could remove an employee serving an eight-day notice without any investigation, if he or she was found to have created obstacles in maintaining office discipline, the newspaper said.

The report gave further conditions under which a government employee could lose his or her job and added that the provisions to terminate the government employees would be brought in by restoring some clauses of a now-scrapped ordinance of 1979 and amending the existing law on government services.

Currently, some 15,00,000 people are serving as government employees while their job is regulated under the Government Servants Discipline & Appeal Rules 2018, which demands a lengthy process to be exhausted to sack a government servant.

The proposed law would soon be placed before the advisory council, effectively the cabinet, it added.