HSSC to recruit 34,000 employees to Group D posts

Pradeep Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 3

After dragging its feet for over three years, the state government has finally put in place an institutional mechanism for the recruitment to the Group D posts. Now, the Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) will be the nodal agency for such recruitments.

With this, decks have been cleared for the filling up of over 34,000 Group D posts in the state government, including boards and corporations, which had been hanging fire for years on account of lack of any transparent institutional mechanism.

The Chief Secretary’s Office has already directed the departments, boards and corporations to send fresh requisition for the Group D posts to the Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC).

The Chief Secretary’s order stated that all requisitions for these posts sent by the departments concerned to the state government would be “treated as withdrawn”.

Successive state governments, including the previous Congress government headed by Bhupinder Singh Hooda and current government headed by Manohar Lal Khattar, had been struggling to carry out Class IV recruitments in ‘transparent manner’ in the wake of lack of a transparent institutional mechanism.

While there is an institutional mechanism for the recruitment to Class I, II and III posts, ad hocism ruled the roost in the recruitment to Class IV jobs that were mostly recruited under the supervision of district-level officials with nepotism being a norm.

The bringing of the Class IV recruitments under HSSC ambit, sources said, would end ad hocism and lead to transparency. Currently, it is estimated that out of 77,370 Class IV posts, only about 43,000 posts are filled up.

With unemployment scenario being dismal in the state, a government job, even though a Class IV job, was still a preferred destination for unemployed persons in the state.

Last year, the Education Department had advertised 2,900 posts of peon, gardener, chowkidar and waterman for which about 5.56 lakh persons had applied. Even during Hooda’s time, over 4.3 lakh applicants had applied for 2,100 posts of peon in the boards and corporations.

Under the previous Congress regime headed by Bhupinder Singh Hooda, there were allegations of large-scale nepotism in recruitments made by the government agencies such as Haryana Public Service Commission (HPSC) and Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC).

Transparency in job selections was one of the poll promises of the BJP in the run-up to 2014 Assembly and Parliamentary elections.