Awash with vacancies

It sounds incredible. What will be the level of efficiency and delivery if the administration leaves three quarter of a lakh of vacancies unfilled in various departments? We have authentic reports that over 60,646 posts of Gazetted and Non-gazetted cadre are lying vacant in various departments of the State Government in Jammu and Kashmir. Out of these, 16,447 posts are lying vacant in the Education Department alone. The next comes in Health and Medical Education Department where 5793 Gazetted and Non-gazetted vacancies are lying vacant. The other major departments where hundreds of post of various cadres lie vacant are General Administration, PWD (R&W), Power, Forest, Rural Development, Finance, CAPD and Cooperative Departments. Entire civil administration is awash with vacancies.
It is a mystery that in a State with nearly 61 thousand posts vacant in administration, hundreds and thousands of educated youth are jobless.  The Government doles out sermons about self-employment, skills, training in various trades etc. It aims at projecting itself as the well-wisher of the educated unemployed youth. Charity begins at home. Sixty-one thousand Gazetted and Non – gazetted vacancies are already budgeted and no new financial support is needed to run the administration. Yet notwithstanding all that, the posts remain vacant. Why is it so, is a million dollar questions. The commonplace argument is that recruitment has to take place through Public Service Commission for the Gazetted post for the Non-gazetted vacancies the Recruitment Board is the proper agency. Administration takes shelter behind the pretext that the PSC and Service Selection Board move at a snail’s pace and consumes months and years to recommend prospective candidates. If this is the factual position, the administration should have taken steps to streamline the recruiting agencies. If their rules and procedures are outdated, these have to be replaced with more creative and pragmatic rules and recruitments to make functionality smoother. Therefore, the reason that the recruiting agencies are slow and lethargic is not tenable.
There are a number of surmises and speculations. Is leaving such a large number of posts vacant for such a long time can be a ploy for encouraging corruption and illegal appointments through backdoor? We do not say it is so but then the system gives rise to speculations and wild surmises.  Another aspect of prolonged delay in recruitment is to leave chances open for temporary and ad hoc appointments against the vacant posts. Only recently, the Governor, when he was running the administration, had ordered that temporary and part-time appointments be stopped. We are not aware whether the new Government will adhere to what the Governor had thought necessary in this context.
At one point of time, we were learnt that even the PSC and the Recruitment Board were short of labor. The PSC had not the full strength of members sanctioned and event the post of the Chairman remained in a state of limbo for a long time. However, PSC sources have repudiated it. They say that their functionality remains unobstructed by logistical deficiencies if any. If the system is cumbersome and too complicated, the Government should take care of it.  Public Service Commission is not supposed to do that job, and therefore, it cannot be accused of unnecessary delay in delivery.
The most sordid part of this endemic inefficiency and lack of interest on the part of various recruiting agencies is that nearly two thousand posts are lying vacant in Ladakh region. The nation need not be told that Ladakh is a backward region owing to difficulties of road communication. The people in Ladakh have the lowest income per capita in the State of J&K. They are educationally backward because they do not have institutions of higher learning like universities, engineering and medical colleges and other professional institutions that are employment oriented. Thousand of Ladakhi students, boys and girls have shifted to Jammu and sought admission in local institutions because full educational facilities are not available in Ladakh. The Government needs to have shown special interests in providing employment to the youth from Ladakh. If two thousand vacancies exist in the Ladakh Affairs department, these should have been filled without loss of time and thousands of household would have been benefitted.
With such a massive number of posts vacant, it is beyond imagination if the Government can truly function to the optimum. Leave good governance alone, even ordinary governance is elusive in the State. We would like to impress upon the Government to bring about a slew of reforms in recruitment procedures. The existing rules and procedures are obsolete and out of tune for the modern world. Test and evaluation system needs reformation. The PSC should ponder over the option of digitalizing recruitment system… Simplification of procedure is highly desirable in the PSC and Recruitment Board. The sooner these reforms are brought the better.

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