N. Rahul 
Hyderabad: Amid criticism by the opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) as “bogus” and a “joke played on unemployed youth”, the Congress government in Telangana released a ‘job calendar’ on Friday, August 2. A job calendar, a key poll promise of the Congress party, provides the list of vacancies in government departments and a timeline of when those posts are to be filled.
It is a unique practice for a government to choose the floor of legislature to release such a calendar of jobs it proposes to fill over the next year.
In the hope of coming to power, the party had even allotted a page in the manifesto specifying the posts it wanted to fill in various government departments against certain dates from February to June this year.
Eight months after assuming power, the Congress government revisited its promise of a job calendar by issuing what appears to be a realistic calendar with categories of posts that would be notified, tentative months of exam, name of recruiting agency and qualification required of candidates. The document did not contain the number of posts that would be filled.
Releasing the document, deputy chief minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka said the government contemplated implementing the sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes in the selection of candidates as suggested by the Supreme Court.
He recalled that the unemployment problem in the state was poorly handled by the previous BRS government by delaying recruitment exams. The cancellation of the Group-I services exam twice and question paper leakage in exams conducted by the state public service commission added to a series of lapses.
Congress legislators complimenting chief minister A. Revanth Reddy over the release of job calendar in Assembly. Photo: By arrangement.
Vikramarka said the Congress government had already issued appointment letters to 32,420 fresh recruits in various services and another 13,505 jobs were in the advanced stage of being filled up.
The opposition BRS staged a walkout from the House when its demand for a discussion on the Calendar was turned down by Speaker G. Prasad Kumar on the ground that the rules of legislative business did not permit the same. The protest was marked by an angry confrontation between Congress and BRS members.
The BRS members staged a sit-in near the Telangana martyrs memorial outside the Assembly raising the slogan “Job Calendar go back”.
The party’s working president K.T. Rama Rao and a senior leader T. Harish Rao said the calendar was “bogus and a joke played on unemployed youth”.
Rama Rao said the Congress had promised to fill two lakh jobs within a year of coming to power. But, not a single job had been created so far, he said. The jobs that Congress claimed to have delivered were actually notified by the BRS government. The BRS conducted the exams and announced the results. The Congress only issued appointment letters, he charged.
The police arrested protesting BRS MLAs at the memorial and shifted them in vans. The employment scene in 10 years of BRS rule was a dismal picture with youth taking to agitation path as they were clueless about the government’s intentions on recruitment exams.
The former information technology minister, K.T. Rama Rao, claimed earlier the BRS government had filled 1.6 lakh government job vacancies and added another 4.3 lakh IT jobs in the private sector. This had helped the state achieve the highest per capita income in the country of over Rs 3 lakh in the last year of the BRS regime, he said.
In an open letter to agitating students, he had said Telangana was poised to emerge at the top of the country by filling over 2.5 lakh jobs. About 1.35 lakh jobs were already filled in the first term of BRS from 2014 to 2018 and the recruitment process for 90,000 jobs was initiated in the second term from 2018 to 2023.
However, a three-member Pay Revision Commission appointed by the government said in its report in December 2020 that 1.91 lakh posts were lying vacant in government departments since the formation of the state in 2014.
During the BRS rule, thousands of youth from villages camped in Hyderabad to prepare for recruitment exams at coaching centres when the government announced a schedule to fill up vacancies in Group I, II and III services. They rented accommodation and took coaching at exorbitant tuition fees. However, their hopes were dashed following the leakage of question papers for Group I exam. Further leaks in other exams conducted by the state public service commission which came to light later created an uproar among youth as the dates were indefinitely postponed, giving the Congress much-needed support of this section in the Assembly elections.
The youth took to the streets near the coaching centres to protest the bungling in the conduct of exams.
Telangana Jana Samiti president M. Kodandaram who had proposed the job calendar for the first time in 2015 told The Wire that the government initiative was a great relief to youth as they could plan their preparations for multiple exams. He said in the absence of a calendar, they go through the psychological pressure of studying the same books and topics repeatedly because they have no idea when the exams will be conducted. The calendar also eliminates the possibility of postponement of exams, he added.