Recruitment drive at RTO to end three-year staff shortage

The transport authority has not been able to hire new employees for the past three years, increasing the time it takes for the existing staff to process the thousands of requests it gets every day

Citizens who have to visit the Pune Regional Transport Office (RTO) are often apprehensive of the long queues and hours of waiting for their requests to be processed. However, there could be some relief for them in the future, as the RTO intends to hire more staff by the end of the month to deal with the workload.

Over 5,000 people visit the RTO every day, and the 205 current employees are struggling to deal with the load, each doing the work of four

Following the Maharashstra Knowledge Board (MKB) declaring examination results on August 23, the RTO has decided to recruit 30 new employees, and with good reason. The transport authority had not made any staff hires in the past three years, leading to an acute shortage of staff.

The current number of employees at the office is 205, including 164 clerical staff and 41 officers. However, the RTO needs 227 employees at any point, to cope with the requests that pour in from the 5,000 people that visit every day. On an average, around 13,500 two-wheelers and 4,949 four-wheelers are added to the city roads every month, which means 450 two-wheelers and 165 four-wheelers have to be processed every day.

RTO staffers claim each employee has to carry the workload of four people on any given day. To make matters worse, there is not a single person to assist them, so the staff end up carrying files from table to table, eventually increasing the time they take to process work as well.

The RTO can only hire candidates who clear the examination conducted by the MKB. However, the last time the exam was conducted was in 2011, when the RTO had hired 20 clerical staff. In the three years since, 35 employees have retired, but not a single new recruit has come in. By March 2015, more people will have retired, bringing the total number of vacancies in the office to 62.

Sudhir Bodas, chief consultant for the Maharashtra Motor Vahan Vibhag Karmachari Sanghatna said, “We have been facing a staff crunch for more than three years. We need more hands , as each person is handling the workload of four. By the end of the financial year, 62 posts will be vacant, so we need at least 60 new people to ease the pressure on the staff.”

Jitendra Patil, regional transport officer said, “We have already given the proposal to hire staff to the transport commissioner. With the Maharashtra Knowledge Board results out, we are likely to get 30 new staffers by the end of next month. I will try to get more staff so that the work load is equally distributed and people coming to Pune RTO do not have to wait for a long time to get their work done.”

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