An Indian Civil Servant Just Got Sacked After Not Turning Up For Work For 25 Years

REUTERS/Carlo Allegri Not the civil servant in question.

India is going through some serious public sector reforms under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So not turning up for work for a quarter of a century is now not OK, as one civil servant found out recently.

India's Central Public Works Department (CPWD), in a press release dated Jan. 8, 2015, announced the dismissal of a senior electrical engineer employed by the department for 35 years. He only worked the first 10.

It sounds like the CPWD could use a bit of reorganisation. The employee stopped turning up for work in 1990, and an inquiry was launched in 1992. The department then seems to have forgotten about it for 13 years:

Charges were clearly established six years ago, but Verma apparently remained in employment for another eight years until he was sacked today. It's not clear from the press release whether he was paid over the whole period. In 2014, a German civil servant admitted he hadn't done any work in the last 14 years, but Verma beats him by a decade.