The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: In its latest annual report for the year 2023-2024, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has omitted data on reservation in central government jobs and positions. ‘
In the annual report, published last month, a table containing details about all central government positions across ministries and departments, and the number of scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, and other backward classes employees across groups A, B, C, and D has been left out, reported The Hindu.
Earlier, the table was included in all past DoPT reports.
While the DoPT has not yet responded to queries sent by the newspaper, the Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch (AARM), a Left-affiliated rights body, criticised the move and said that at a national convention held on Sunday (December 1, 2024) on the exclusion of adivasis from jobs, “deliberate concealment” of data on reservations in government jobs had emerged as a primary concern.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat termed the move as “deliberate concealment” of information and said that it was a way to “disarm” marginalised communities from seeking and asserting their rights.
“They can’t even go to court because there is no complete, consolidated data of how many jobs there are, how many reserved posts have been filled and how many remain vacant,” said Karat.
An analysis of publicly available Annual Reports of the DoPT revealed that the table on reservations mentioned a total of over 32 lakh government employees till January 1, 2016, the data for which was available in the Annual Report of 2018-19.
But, in the subsequent report onwards, the total number of government employees in the table for reservations is showed to be around 19 lakh.