Serving or Retired: DoPT says it has no clue on status of 2 missing officers; requests colleagues to give tips on their whereabouts

IN A bizarre situation, the department of personnel and training (DoPT) of the government of India has found out that the department not only does not know the whereabouts of two officers, Nokhey Lal Hans and Prem Prakash, but is also unsure whether they are still serving or retired. In other words, the two officers are missing, and their records too must have been lost. So, the DoPT in the last resort issued an office memorandum (OM) on April 16 requesting other officers to...
“inform any detail about the two officers from their current as well as old records”. According to the available records, the officers belong to Schedule Caste categories, but the DoPT is not sure whether the said two officers belong to Central Secretariat Service, CSS (Assistant/SO/US) or Central Secretariat Stenographers Service (CSSS) (PA/PS/PPS). “The officers may have already retired”, the OM said.
Here is the full text of the Office Memorandum
“In connection with conduct of a Review DPC, this Department is searching for whereabouts of the following two officers who are in the field of consideration.
i) Shri Nokhey Lal Hans (SC category)
ii) Shri Prem Prakash (SC category)
2. The officers may belong to either CSS (Assistant/SO/US) or CSSS (PA/PS/PPS) and may have already retired. This Department does not have any further information to correctly identify them. Ministries/Departments and individual officers are requested to kindly inform any detail about the two officers from their current as well as old records.
As the information is required very urgently, the response in the matter may be furnished latest by 30.04.2015."
The DoPT's office memorandum dated April 16 was signed by V Srinivasaragavan, under secretary to Government of India.
It is surprising that in this era of technology, the government still maintains records in Nadawala files (files bound by red tape) leading to the loss of data. How can the government say that it does not have records to verify whether two of its officers are serving or retired, and if serving, which service?
In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha on December 21, 2011, the then minister of state in PMO V Narayanasamy informed how the government proposed to computerize all non-sensitive files. The government said, it included e-Office as one of the Mission Mode Projects (MMP) under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP).
But the reality is, nothing much has progressed so far. Only a few ministries are somewhat experimenting with e-files in parallel to the conventional paper files.