Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has approved the proposal of abolishing 9,304 posts in military engineering services. The decision was in line with the recommendations of the committee of experts, headed by Lt General Shekatkar, which had suggested measures to enhance combat capability and rebalance defence expenditure of the Armed Forces.

"Rajnath Singh has approved the proposal of Engineer-in-Chief of Military Engineering Services (MES) for optimisation of more than 9,300 posts in the basic and industrial workforce," ministry of defence said in a press release on Thursday.

Military Engineer Services (MES) is one of the oldest and largest government defence infrastructure development agency in India. It is one of largest construction and maintenance agencies in India with a total annual budget to the tune of approximately Rs 13,000 crore.

One of the recommendations made by the committee was to restructure the civilian workforce in a manner that the work of MES could be partly done by departmentally employed staff and other works could be outsourced, the ministry said.

"In line with the recommendations of the committee, the proposal of abolition of 9,304 posts in MES out of the total 13,157 vacancies of the basic and industrial staff has been approved by the defence minister," the ministry said.

The recommendation was aimed at making MES an effective organisation with a leaner workforce, well equipped to handle complex issues in the emerging scenario in an efficient and cost effective manner, it added.

MES is responsible for design, construction and maintenance of all infrastructure assets of the Army, Navy and Air Force. It functions under the overall control of the Engineer-in- Chief, who is the advisor to the ministry of defence and the three services on operational and peace time construction activities.

By Chitranjan Kumar