Government says goodbye to clerk era, changes designation for its staff

NEW DELHI: Designations like Lower Division Clerk (LDC) and Upper Division Clerk (UDC) in central government's employee hierarchy have been replaced with new nomenclature.

The posts of UDC and LDC under Central Secretariat Clerical Service (CSCS) have been rechristened as Senior Secretariat Assistant and Junior Secretariat Assistant, respectively, an order issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) said.

Besides, the post of Assistant under Central Secretariat Service (CSS) has been renamed as Assistant Section Officer, it said.

Both the CSCS and CSS form the backbone of administrative work in the central government.

The total sanctioned strength of CSS and CSCS is 11,467 and 5,933 respectively.

Earlier in March, the DoPT had decided to replace the 'class' categorisation for specifying the seniority of its employees with new alphabetical groupings.

The posts under the central government will be denoted as groups A, B, C and D instead of classes I, II, III and IV in the service rules, it had said.

The Class-III (Group C) employees had expressed concern that they were taunted as 'third-class' employees due to the categorisation.

The Class-I classification is for gazetted officers while Class-II refers to mainly the non-gazetted officers, though there are some gazetted officers in this category too.

Class-III comprises clerical staff and Class-IV (which is now subsumed in Class III or Group C) includes peons and helps or multi-tasking staff in the government hierarchy.