Designations like Lower Division Clerk and Upper Division Clerk in the central government’s employee hierarchy may soon become passe as the Centre has proposed to change their nomenclature.

The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) is considering changing nomenclature of a few posts of Central Secretariat Clerical Service (CSCS) and Central Secretariat Service (CSS), which form the backbone of administrative work in the central government. It is proposed to rename the post of Assistant in CSS as Assistant Section Officer. Similarly, the posts of Upper Division Clerk and Lower Division Clerk under CSCS have been proposed to be rechristened as Senior Secretariat Assistant and Junior Secretariat Assistant, respectively, according to the DoPT.

All concerned have been asked to send in their inputs or suggestions on the proposal by September 18, it said. The total sanctioned strength of CSS and CSCS is 11,467 and 5,933 respectively. Earlier in March, it 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, it had said.

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.

The Class-III (Group C) employees have expressed concern that they are taunted as ‘third-class’ employees due to the categorisation.

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