we live in place where students made the scapegoats. I am not being harsh, but I am penning down the reality that the student community is facing from decades. Every parent in India and especially J&K wish their children get settled as soon as possible, in terms of financial security. The dream of every parent in J&K is to see their children serving in the government sector. There is no surprise in this. We all know the circumstances we are facing from decades. In the last two decades, we have seen why private sector couldn’t flourish here. Being in the private sector your income can all of sudden turn to nil when clampdown occurs? It is the sad reality that many people really lost their jobs during the years when there had been total lockdown in J&K, especially in Kashmir Valley. This is the main reason that every parent here wants children to find a government job.
There has been a rapid rise in the unemployment graph in J&K in the last years. As per the report published in Deccan Herald, J&K is brewing at 16% unemployment rate which is much higher than overall employment rate of India i.e. 6.7%. By this report, the J&K marks the second position after Rajasthan. Every year there is a huge lot of pass-outs from various Engineering colleges across J&K, and there has not been any major recruitment from years now. In the recent Panchayat Accountant Assistants, you can find the aspirants from diverse educational backgrounds and the reason for it is there is no discipline centric advertisements from so many years. The job aspirants in J&K want to settle anywhere as they know anything happens here, and no one knows what is going to happen next moment. Various departments across J&K take years to compile the vacancies and forward it to the recruiting agency, this leads to stagnation, and unemployment shoots up.
Now I want to highlight the problems in our recruiting agencies – Jammu & Kashmir Service Selection Board (JKSSB) and Staff Selection Commission (SSC). There has been two recent advertisement notices by JKSSB wherein various departments had referred the same posts with same grade pay and selection procedure. But the aspirants are being called to fill the separate forms with separate fee for every post they want to apply for. Few years ago, I filled 3 different forms of different departments but the advertisement notice was same and I had to pay fee for all the 3 forms. The irony is when the admit card was issued there was a single test for all the 3 posts. Likewise in the recent advertisement notices, an aspirant who is unemployed and hardly earning any money, he is being called to deposit fee in thousands. A friend of mine called me and told me that he is eligible for 13 posts and as per the application procedure he has to deposit 4550 rupees; 350 Rs per post. And why is this so shocking is that there will be single examination for all the posts. Whereas when you talk of Service Selection Board, recruiting agency for central govt posts, they list all the posts together and call it a Common Graduate Level examination, wherein you have to deposit just 100 rupees for all the posts mentioned in the advertisement and you have to set preference for the posts.
Now the question is why JKSSB does not go for this; being the government agency one remains clueless what for they need so much of amount. 1 lakh 60 thousands (1,60,000) panchayat account assistant aspirants submitted their forms with a fee of 350 Rupees and it comes to 56,000,000 (Five Crore Sixty Lakhs). Why is this amount being taken from the unemployed youth? Why don’t they keep 100 Rs fee for one advertisement? I can’t rule out that conducting examination wont incur the expenditure but to this extent, not really!