India is a land of ironies but the recent Republic Day saw one of the most gut-wrenching incidents. While a grand parade marched in New Delhi showcasing India’s military might and progress, widespread protests were taking place in the States of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, as angry youth took to streets demanding that the flawed selection process for railway jobs be rectified.
The numbers behind these protests are mind-boggling: Indian Railways had advertised about 35,000 jobs in 2019. Over 12.5 milion persons applied. Ultimately, when the examination was held in phases between December 2020 and July 2021, some 6 million actually sat for it. What caused their anger to burst out now was the arbitrary fiddling around that the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) appeared to be doing with exam phases and candidates.
Note the numbers: 35,000 posts, 12.5 million applicants. That’s a reflection of both, the dire employment situation in India as well as the rejection of private jobs by aspirants, who prefer the security of government jobs even if they may get paid less. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women work day and night in difficult circumstances to clear these competitive exams for government jobs.
Answering a query in Parliament, the Prime Minister’s Office, which is in charge of the ministry of personnel, public grievances and pensions, said on July 29, 2021, that a grand total of 445,000 persons were recruited by the Government of India between 2016-17 and 2020-21 by three of its recruitment agencies – Union Public Services Commission (UPSC), Staff Selection Commission (SSC) and Railway Recruitment Board (RRB).
Central govt. vacancies
There is a huge chasm between existing vacancies and the government’s efforts to recruit new persons to fill these up. The same Parliament statement referred to above gave details of vacancies in Central government ministries/departments. [See table below] A total of over 872,000 posts are lying vacant, it was revealed. This is after the 445,000 recruited in the past five years.
Some of the ministries/departments actually contribute the lion’s share of vacancies, as shown above. For instance, about 248,000 civilian posts are lying vacant in the defense ministry, some 128,000 in the home ministry and over 237,000 in the Railways. Even an important ministry such as health and family welfare – remember the COVID pandemic? – has over 2,000 vacant posts. It looks like the Bharatiya Janata Party government is not even true to its own avowed concerns – the water resources ministry, which includes Ganga Rejuvenation in its amended name now, has over 4,500 vacancies.
These vacant posts are arising because the Narendra Modi government upholds the rather suspect and discredited notion of “minimum government” cutting back on spending on salaries, benefits etc. So, new appointments are a red flag for them. To some extent, the slack is picked up by appointing contract employees for fixed terms. These employees are paid very low wages and get practically no benefits.
Of the 872,000 vacancies, 756,000 or 87% are Grade C Non-Gazetted posts. Just 2.4% of the vacancies are in the Grade A category. The guillotine has thus fallen on the lower paid ranks while the elite officers have ridden out the “minimum governance” dictum quite well, it appears.
Other vacancies controlled by central govt.
The above description was for vacancies in ministries and departments. But besides these, the Central government directly controls a range of institutions and bodies, including public sector undertakings, judiciary, armed forces etc. Vacancies are rife in these too, as can be seen from the following sample. [See table below] There are many more institutions and bodies like this, but information is not easily available for all.
As can be seen, there are over 25,000 vacancies in different educational institutions run by the Central government, which include Central universities, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs), Kendriya Vidyalayas, IITs and IIMs. Public sector banks have over 41,000 vacancies, High Courts are short of over 400 judges, etc.
But the biggest chunk of vacancies exist in two bodies: armed forces (over 122,000), central armed police forces (like CRPF, BSF, SSB, CISF, ITBP, etc) which have over 96,000 vacancies and Gramin Dak Sewaks (postal delivery persons) over 73,000 vacancies.
Clearly, the Modi government is not too worried about the defense of the country or its security domestically although it keeps beating the patriotism drum and exhorting everybody to be a ‘nationalist’ and a patriot. Neither is it disturbed by delayed justice, if one goes by the vacancies in judiciary. For the Modi government, saving money matters more than high-flying sermons that it delivers off and on.
Indirectly controlled vacancies
Besides the above two categories, the Central government also exerts control over many cadres of employees that are technically under State governments. This happens because funds for such appointments come in large part from Delhi.
An example of this is appointment of health personnel in the National Health Mission (NHM) where bulk of funding comes from the Central government. According to the response of the health minister in Lok Sabha [the lower house of parliament] (No.3391) on December 17, 2021, there were over 10,000 doctors posts lying vacant, besides over 9,000 posts of specialists like surgeons, obstetricians, gynecologists and pediatricians under the NHM. [See table below]
Over 9,000 posts of technical staff, like pharmacists, X-ray technicians and laboratory staff are lying vacant. There were over 18,000 posts of nurses vacant. The scale of these vacancies shows how ill prepared the system was for tackling the pandemic.
All of these could possibly have been filled up with more funding and a push from the Central government to expedite the process. Not only would such an urgent push helped treat thousands of people suffering during the COVID-19 devastation, it would also have provided employment.
The frustration and anger exhibited by youth in Bihar and UP in the past few days at the botched RRB recruitment is just the tip of the iceberg. As the information given above shows, there are hundreds of thousands of vacancies in the government sector alone and the Modi government is blithely indifferent to the demands of the jobless youth to fill these up.
