Lahore - The Provincial Selection Board recently held a meeting to take up the promotion cases of grade-17 officials.

Additional Chief Secretary Shumail Ahmad Khwaja presided over the meeting while Services Secretary Farhan Aziz Khawaja, Regulations Secretary Dr Saleh Tahir, Additional Admin Secretary and other senior officers joined in.

Twenty-five officers belonging to the Secretariat Service and one officer belonging to Executive Provincial Civil Service (PCS) cadre have been promoted to grade-18 and would be deputed at the Civil Secretariat as well as the other field formations throughout the province.

A good number of officers were promoted on regular basis while some on officiating basis.

Official sources said that PSS officers belonging to the 2000, 2001 and 2002 batches were promoted to next grade while PCS (executive) officers of these batches have already been promoted owing to their big share in the ratio.

The one PCS officer out of the leftover cases was promoted while others were not owing to various reasons like incomplete service record, pending inquiries etc.

Those promoted to grade-18 as deputy secretaries/ADCs include Khalid Bashir, Ahmad Kamal, Khalid Masood Farooka, Saleem Sagar, Rizwan Arooj Bhatti, Jafar Ali Khan, Tariq Masood Farooka, Muhammad Hamza, Muhammad Ansar, Tauqeer Haider Kazmi, Tariq Mahmood Awan, Mukhtar Ahmad, Muhammad Hamza, Mehmood ul Hasan, Ejaz Joya, Sajid Bashir, Abdul Rauf, Nabila Javed, Zahida Azhar, Abdul Razzaq, Athar Saeed, Sajjad Gondal, Habib Khalid Habib, Tariq Jamil and Abdul Qadeer Shami.

It is also learnt that there were 21 cases of the PCS officers against 34 posts, while only one officer became eligible as others were facing various inquiries or could not complete mandatory training. Thus remaining 13 posts were given to the PSS group.

Sources told The Nation that the government would amend some provisions of the Civil Administration Act 2017 to change the nomenclature of some posts. The ACs and Section Officers will be promoted as Deputy Secretaries in the Civil Secretariat or Additional Deputy Commissioners (ADCs) in the field. The posts vacated after promotion of the officers would be filled by the officers belonging to the Provincial Management Service (PMS).