MyGov anniversary celebration

NEW DELHI: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering his townhall address at the concluding session of theon Saturday, hundreds of scientists and IT professionals of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) - backbone of the government's digital India programme - could be seen dotting the venue wearing 'black badges'.They were neither protesting against the event nor any of the government's web-based programme which they had themselves worked on quite hard to make it success. They have, in fact, been in the protest mode for long against the ministry of electronics and information technology (ME&IT) for not heeding to their demand of promotion of over 3,000 NIC scientists from across the country."They have been wearing black badges since July 4 and have decided to intensify the protest across the country by going on 'mass casual leave' on August 23", said B N Shetty, DDG (NIC) and president of the All India NIC S&T Officer's Association (AINOA).Though Shetty himself was not at the venue of the MyGov anniversary celebration at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in New Delhi, he told TOI that nearly 500 of the NIC scientists were there as part of their works relating to the event.Asked about their demand, Shetty said, "The main demand of the officers' association is to grant retrospective in-situpromotion to all eligible Group A S&T officers of NIC from January 2011. They have been working at the same post for the past 10-11 years without any promotion\appraisal".The association, having over 3,200 members, had earlier decided to go on the mass casual leave on August 10. But, it later postponed it to August 23 after getting assurance from the secretary of the ministry of electronics and IT to understand the situation and resolve the issue.The AINOA also wrote to the minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, seeking his intervention to address the demand of the NIC officers who have been involved in many activities including MyGov, e-Greetings, Aadhar-based biometric attendance system, visitors monitoring system, tourist visa on arrival and secure email within the government among others.Asked why their promotions got delayed, another senior officer pointed to a technical issue where the IT professionals of the NIC, which had hired candidates with MCA backgrounds and other similar degrees, were left out due to entirely different rules that are applied to scientists of other government's departments under the existing promotion scheme.