Clamour for govt jobs marked by court cases, cheating and caste equations

The pan-India fascination about central govt jobs is the context of PM Modi's new plan to recruit one million staffers within less than two years

There is a simple metric to understand the fascination for government jobs in India. Of all the tribunals established by the Centre, the largest spread across India is of the Central Administrative Tribunal. With 40 benches, the tribunal decides on disputes and complaints about recruitment to government offices and conditions of service, once the employees are in. The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal has more benches, at 67, but they are more limited in their geographic spread. 

Fascination with recruitment to government jobs is a pan-India phenomenon, albeit with some regional variations. This is the context of the plan to recruit one million central government employees within less than two years, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced yesterday. 

Govt service at all costs: 

This fascination exists even though, by all reckoning, India employs fewer people than most other countries, in terms of the number of staff in key departments. There are three reasons for the fascination. Even though government jobs do not offer a defined benefit pension any more, they are considered massively profitable as hardly anyone gets dismissed for not doing his or her job. In a Parliament reply in 2021, the department of personnel and training noted only seven IAS officers were arrested for corruption during the past three years. The number of IPS is just one. 

Second, because the recruits have no skill training for the jobs they are supposed to do, a large mass of students from every conceivable course seeks to join. In a UP police constable exam, nearly 20 per cent of those recruited were engineering graduates. The third is the possible authority a government job offers to the candidate to lord it over a poor population—a sense of power. Incidentally to make it easy for candidates with poor oral communication skills, the government has done away with interviews for all public service examinations, except the civil services. This has expanded the catchment area for government services. 

As a result, every advertisement issued by the 29 state public service commissions for recruitment carries a version of the following sentence. “This recruitment is subject to the result of a court case” or something similar. These cases are often filed by those who did not clear the examination.

The other risk is the leak of examination papers. In Karnataka and Rajasthan, exams to recruit police constables were cancelled in April and May due to paper leak. Recruitment to the ranks of police constable and of contract teachers are the largest avenues for government employment in the North Indian states. The stakes are clearly very high to get into these jobs. 

This week, the Uttar Pradesh government has announced plans to recruit 40,000 police personnel. It comes on top of a just completed recruitment drive in which 9,534 sub inspectors were appointed. 

Scale of recruiting agency: 

The government will face three other challenges in this massive recruitment drive. The first is that no agency is equipped to handle such large-scale recruitment at such short notice--not even the National Recruitment Agency (NRA) set up by the Union Cabinet in August 2020. From the Union Public Service Commission, which handles recruitment of officers, under secretary and above, to the Railway Recruitment Boards that select non-executive employees for the national infrastructure agency, their combined recruitment per year is about a 100,000. 

NRA is expected to subsume the role of multiple recruiting agencies for various posts. It is supposed to run a common admission test twice a year. A cabinet note issued when NRA was set up explained, “At present, candidates seeking government jobs have to appear for separate examinations…pay fee to multiple recruiting agencies and also have to travel long distances for appearing in various exams”.A government estimate notes that every year, approximately 25 million candidates appear in these multiple recruitment examinations for approximately 125,000vacancies. NRA, which is expected to solve those pain points, is not yet functional, and a Parliament committee report of March 2022 has rapped the department of personnel and training for the delay, even though it has got a budget allocation already. 

Referring to the announcement made by the defence ministry on Wednesday to absorb 46,000 short-term recruits in the defence forces, a government official said there will be not one, but several similar orders over the next few months from other departments. But the official did not specify if those would be routed through NRA. 

“The Prime Minister's announcement is welcome but we need a disaggregated picture of the departments/ agencies where these jobs will be created, and how the recruitment will be managed. The 7th Pay Commission looked into the structure of central government employment in various ministries and found that most new jobs were in the para military forces. It is not clear whether the net has been cast wider with today's announcement " said Vivek Rae, member of the 7th Central Pay Commission. 

The second challenge is that the central government and the state governments have only a partial picture of the number of people they already employ. The 3.46 million employed as civilian employees in the central government, according to finance ministry documents as on March 2022, are just an approximation. At state levels enumeration of the numbers is usually a once a decade exercise. 

Data on the actual number of government employees is not available at a common portal. For instance, an exercise carried out by the seventh Central Pay Commission showed there was a discrepancy close to 600,000 between the finance ministry data and that of the Directorate General of Employment and Training. The biggest difference was in the head counts in the civilian employees of the ministry of defence  and of the department of posts. (see table) This is not surprising as the two departments are also among the largest recruiters in the government. 

Despite those shortcomings, Rae agreed that the size of the central government in India, benchmarked to global peers, fell short.  For instance, data shows the number of central government employees in India, in terms of personnel per lakh of population at 139 was much lower than the US where the corresponding figure is 668 (As on March 2017). Also persons in positions at the central government as a percentage of sanctioned strength has fallen from 86 per cent in 2006 to 83 per cent in 2010 and to 82 per cent by the middle of the last decade. 

Alarmed by the scale of the differences, the Pay Commission in its report had asked the government to set up a digital database of its personnel. “To ensure integrity and availability of consistent data on personnel in the government, the Commission is of the view that the database on personnel needs to be standardized on an IT platform, across all civil ministries/departments”.

The third is the representation of scheduled castes and tribes in the future selections. Reservation for SC, ST and OBC is mandatory for all government  recruitment. Since posts cannot be flipped between categories, it is possible that at one go the necessary number of candidates for government service from these categories may not become available, in which the reservations have to be carried to subsequent rounds. The aggregate vacancies, in such situations, may therefore offer no suitable way to be clipped even by conducting recruitment drives.  

Table: Unfilled posts in GOI

Group A 

Under secretary and above  21,255 

Group B 

Section officers and above 94,599  Group C All non executive posts including helpers 756,146 

As per Parliament reply March 2022