All parties are aware of this, and the promise of filling up 10,000 vacancies in government departments by December 19 this year gives the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party a head start over the opposition. The process to fill up the vacancies has started and in the last four months 1800 vacancies have been advertised in 13 departments, while another 4640 personnel in 28 departments are already being recruited. If the government keeps up the pace, it could well meet its target of December 19, 2021, and this will be evidence of just how important jobs are for electoral purposes.
The government has planned the process minutely. To make it easier to fill up the vacancies, the government in June had lifted the ban on recruitment that had been imposed in November 2016 by the then Laxmikant Parsekar government immediately after announcing the implementation of Seventh Pay Commission as this would add to the financial burden. The subsequent loss in the elections is something that the Bharatiya Janata Party is unlikely to forget anytime soon. That is still formed a government when regional parties rushed to align with the Bharatiya Janata Party is another matter. The fact is that the bar on recruitment did play a role in the election loss.
It is clear that the government hopes to ride the employment wave to an election victory, and this could even help it, but is recruitment in government departments the answer to the problem of unemployment that the State is facing? Shouldn’t jobs come from the private sector, through investment from entrepreneurs? The State needs a policy to generate employment.
Without a doubt, unemployment is an issue in the State and the All India Trade Union Congress has claimed that over 25,000 people have lost their jobs in the last 18 months and that the assurances by the Chief Minister regarding job creation have been done so only to fool the public. The number of 25,000 job losses is huge and this is merely a claim, but the COVID-19 pandemic did lead to job losses across various sectors, but as the State recovers from the lockdowns and curfews and restrictions are eased, economic activity is also showing an upturn and some of the job losses should be gained back in the coming weeks and months.
On the other hand, the opposition parties have cautioned the government on the recruitment spree it is on, citing the State’s weak financial situation and the additional burden that will be created on the exchequer. The State, which is selling government stock, is hardly in a position to take on a supplementary liability of salaries for the new recruits. The opposition has a valid argument there as the State is staring at an additional Rs 360 cr annual burden to meet the salaries of the new personnel it is currently in the process to taking in.
Financially, can the State meet this added expense without further borrowing? It already has a high government staff to population ratio with 1 government servant for every 22 persons. Does the state need to add another 11,000 to this? That should be a question that the government must consider as it takes on the recruitment drive. Simultaneously, it requires to undertake an exercise of restricting the public workforce to weed out the flab that exists and trim it so that performance improves. Rather than increasing government jobs, the State requires an employment policy that will create jobs in the private sector. That should be the priority of the government and not increasing the public workforce.
