In a move to check National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineers joining private highway builders and consultants sometimes less than a year after retirement giving rise to potential conflict of interest, the highway authority has now made it mandatory for such officials to get prior approval for any commercial employment that they want to take up during the cooling-off period.

Though this norm is applicable for all Central Service Group-A officials, NHAI officials were not covered under this as most of them are not recruited as Group A officials.

Notifying the new norm, the authority said that in order to safeguard interests of the NHAI or government it has been decided to adopt Rule 9 of Central Civil services (Pension) Rules 2021 as it relates to matters of commercial employment after retirement in respect of officers and employees of NHAI.

It specifies that all NHAI employees or ex-employees need to obtain previous sanction from the authority to accept any commercial employment within one year of retirement.

As per the notification, the employees need to submit details of the commercial organisation, type of business of the entity and whether the officer had dealt with the company in the past three years. The employees will also need to give an undertaking that the proposed employment will not involve conflict of interest with policies of NHAI that they have dealt with in the past three years. They will have to submit qualifications for the job in the firm and the nature of the future job.