Thiruvananthapuram: In an effort to ensure transparency in the assessment of the performance of government employees, all departments and government offices must further submit an annual secret report online officials.
Although digitizing files to ensure finer and faster administration has become a motto from the state government for more than a decade now, except for five departments, the rest still submitted the annual secret reports of their employees manually.
However, according to the latest order issued by the Secretary of the Head on Wednesday, all departments must notify the annual secret reports to employees through web-based software scores developed by the IT Software Department of the Ministry of Finance.
At present, except at the secretariat, self engineering, forests and wildlife, police, and motorized vehicles, offices under the remaining departments submit secret reports manually.
Moving to an online system is expected to increase transparency in preparing the report because they cannot be damaged.
Performance reports are prepared for all officers except the latest class government employees, by their superior officers, every year.
Reports are prepared by assessing them on a scale of one to 10, as extraordinary, very good, good, average, fair and poor, based on those given their promotions.
Despite the latest orders discuss reports as “confidential reports”, the confidentiality of such reports has long been lost since the Supreme Court came with its verdict in Dev Dutt vs Union of India and others on May 12, 2008.
Till later, these reports were referred to as a secret report because Officers who are considered do not know about the ranking by their superiors.
The Supreme Court later argued that every entry in the servant reports must be communicated to him in a reasonable period, whether it was bad, fair, average, good or very good.
The court said that having an entry has been communicated to him, he will know about the assessment of his work and behavior by his superiors, which will enable him to increase his work in the future.
Officers will also get the opportunity to make representations of entries if he feels it cannot be justified, and pray for the increase.
Therefore non-communication from the report arbitrarily, and it violates article 14 constitution.
The government has also issued other orders on Wednesday stating that all government employees must further submit their annual property reports online as well, through Spark software used to withdraw the salaries of government employees in the state.
At present, all-Indian service officers submit their annual property returns online.