As usual, employment of youth remains the embarrassing issue. It is a countrywide phenomenon. In our state it has achieved serious dimensions for two reasons. First is that in absence of vibrant and mega industrial enterprises there are little rather no avenues for employment of youth in private sector. Secondly, the youth are restive and prone to violence, which impacts normal activity of development and progress. We find that the Government is the largest employer. The result is that the Government recruitment agency is over-burdened with the task of recruiting fresh hands in various departments. It means that if the task of fresh recruitment is to be carried out without delay and bottlenecks, the recruiting agency should have all the pre-requisite paraphernalia at its disposal.
In a bid to respond favourably to the demand of the members in the legislature in previous Assembly session, the Government stated that a good number of youth to the tune of 60,000 to 70,000 would be recruited in various Government departments under fast-track scheme. Fast track, as we understand, means that these recruitments would be made within shortest possible time by cutting down many formalities, which consume time and are not of much consequence. It is nearly three months and no movement is visible at any level and in any department about recruiting fresh hands at available vacancies. Observers have found that even the preliminary works of finding out how many vacancies are available at what level and in which department. A consolidated list of existing vacancies should have been provided to the recruiting agencies that would work on their advertisement and follow up action. According to reports from reliable sources this part of the job has not been completed so far. Public Service Commission or Recruitment Boards function within a system, of which the basic procedure is that vacancies have to be referred to it with full details for the purpose of advertisement. Criterion for employment, qualification, and the rules of service etc. all have to be specified. The Departments are reported to be still undecided on these counts. Another difficulty, which has cropped up is that the recruitment agency itself, be it the PSC or Recruitment Boards or whatsoever, and are not fully equipped to work on recruitment schemes. They are either short of manpower, paraphernalia or rules and regulations in the form of guidelines etc.
Besides what has been said about sixty – seventy thousand regular vacancies above, the Government had also announced that various departments would take in nearly 43,000 casual employees. The largest absorption would be in the PDD and PHR with 10,000 in each. Casual/temporary employees are not required to go through the process of regular recruitment. The Government empowers respective HoDs or other officers to make the recruitment through a regularized process. Even these recruitments remain in limbo. More than two years have lapsed when this announcement was made. Again the reasons for delaying the engagement of temporary recruitment are bureaucratic intricacies and insensitivity of officialdom. This is not a healthy sign and the Government should not allow lassitude and lethargy overtake its routine functioning.
Another phenomenon that has now cropped up in connection with fresh recruitments is that of unfair and in just application of service rules leading to litigation and court cases filed by the employees related to recruitment, promotion, transfer and other related matters. These block fresh recruitments until the court decides them. Youth cannot wait indefinitely and our State has already seen how youth anger can cause serious set back to our development. In view of this, the Government should take very serious note of the situation and hasten recruitment on permanent as well as temporary vacancies without loss of time. Fast-track recruitment should not take years and months to happen. The parameters of “fast-track” have not been set forth and the Departments involved take things easy. This trend needs to be arrested.
Follow our WhatsApp channel