NEW DELHI: There is nearly 60 per cent vacancy in positions for reserved for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBCs in the six central government ministries and departments. The ministries are Home, Defence, Railways, Department of Posts, Urban and Housing and Atomic Energy. According to a Rajya Sabha Committee on Personnel and Public Grievances, tabled in Parliament on March 4, about 25,000 reserved category posts are vacant in these ministries.
The unfilled positions in the reserved category appears to go against the Government’s stated focus on ‘sabka vishwas.’ It also seems to ignore alerts sent by the Department of Personnel and Training on reservation rules in direct recruitment of professionals. The DoPT had asked the ministries and central departments to follow the reservation procedure in direct recruitment of officials. The House committee said 7,782 posts remained unfilled out of the 13,968 positions in the SC category. In the ST category, 6,903 posts are unfilled out of a total of 11,040 posts.
The situation is similar in the reserved category of Other Backward Classes (OBC). Of the 20,044 available posts, 10,859 seats were vacant. “It feels that the mounting number of backlog vacancies year on year points to a serious malaise afflicting the entire recruitment system as a whole,” the parliamentary committee report said. The panel impressed upon the ministries and departments concerned to fill up the identified backlog vacancies through special recruitment drives without any further delay.
“The Committee also feels that the Government should take stock of the situation, identify the root causes of (the) backlog vacancies and take necessary remedial measures to prevent recurrence of the same,” the report said. The guidelines on the reservation in direct recruitment in government departments say that if sufficient number of SC/ST/OBC candidates are not available to fill up the vacancies reserved for them in direct recruitment, the quota should not be filled by candidates not belonging to these communities. In other words, there is a ban on de-reservation of vacancies reserved for SCs, STs and OBCs in direct recruitment.