The Bhutanese Leading the way.
Staff Reporter/ Thimphu
As per the latest data from a period of January 2022 to October end 2022 a total of 1,704 civil servants have separated from the civil service of which 1,033 have voluntarily resigned.
Both of the above numbers which are for 10 months are higher compared to the annual data of past years.
The data shows that in 2022 there have been higher separations and voluntary resignations with the main reason being going for further studies to Australia (Box 1).
Of the 1,704 who separated from the service, the largest group is teachers at 414 of them.
Another 179 teachers have taken Extraordinary Leave (EOL) meaning a total of 593 teachers are not in the education system currently due to separation and EOL.
The second biggest occupation group is in the medical and health group where around 186 of them have separated from the group and another 98 have gone on EOL bringing the total to 284 of them.
The biggest ongoing concern here is the number of doctors and nurses separating or going on EOL.
Of this group 3 medical doctors have separated while another 16 have gone on EOL. Nurses who do the heavy lifting for medical care are leaving in numbers as 51 have separated and 40 have gone on EOL.
Other important technical staff like radiologists, laboratory staff, therapists, technicians, diagnostic staff, etc are also leaving or going on EOL.
76 Engineers including some road inspectors have separated and another 26 have gone on EOL.
57 people from the Forest Services have left and another 26 have gone on EOL.
41 ICT services staff have separated while another 10 have gone on EOL.
43 revenue services officers mainly from the Department of Revenue and Customs have separated from service with another 16 going on EOL.
28 from the Financing, Accounting and Budget services have separated while another 44 have gone on EOL.
19 from the planning services have separated while another 10 are on EOL and they play a key role in planning developmental activities across agencies.
Similarly, 38 from program services are separated while another 18 are on EOL.
13 from the survey engineering services have separated while another 8 are on EOL.
13 have left from the Agricultural Production Services and and another 10 are on EOL.
10 Anti Corruption Officials have separated, while another 12 have separated from Royal Audit Authority and two more auditors have gone on EOL.
10 people from Aviation have separated from the aviation services which is another important technical skill.
14 from specialist services who are highly trained technical people across agencies have separated while another 4 are on EOL.
10 people from HR Management have left while 12 are on EOL.
9 from legal services have left while 14 are on EOL.
9 Immigration service people have left with 1 on EOL.
8 from the Metrology and Hydrology services have left.
5 from Architecture and Urban planning have left while another 6 are on EOL.
From Box 2 it is clear that the voluntary resignation number is higher compared to previous years and the resignation in 2022 within 10 months is almost double the total resignations of 2019.
A senior Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC) official had earlier said that while the attrition rate of 4.91% (Box 3) is higher than normal the tentative assessment is that the attrition rate is not very high compared to international standards.
The official had said it is 9 percent in Singapore, 12 percent in UK and so on.
The total number of civil servants separated from all reasons (minus EOL) also follows a similar trend as seen in Box 4.
Apart from the separations of all types there is a total of 618 EOLs from January to October 2022.
