Two hurdles likely as Modi govt sets out on 1 million recruitment plan

There is no agency equipped to handle such a large hiring target and governments don't have a clear picture on the number of people they employ

There would be two key challenges to achieve the goal of recruiting one million within less than two years in the central government that Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Tuesday.
 

This is even though by all reckoning India employs less people, compared to global peers, in the number of people posted in key departments. 

Of the two challenges, the first is that there is no agency that is equipped to handle such a large-scale recruitment at such a short notice. This includes the National Recruitment Agency (NRA) set up by the Union Cabinet in August 2020.

From the Union Public Service Commission that handles recruitment of officers, under secretary and above to the Railway Recruitment Boards that select non-executive employees for the national infrastructure agency, their combined recruitment per year is about 100,000.

NRA is expected to subsume the role of multiple recruiting agencies for various posts. It is supposed to run a common admission test twice a year.

A Cabinet note issued when NRA was set up said, “At present, candidates seeking government jobs have to appear for separate examinations…pay fee to multiple recruiting agencies and also have to travel long distances for appearing in various exams.”

NRA, which is expected to solve those pain points, is yet to be functional. A Parliament committee report of March 2022 has rapped the department of personnel and training for the delay, even though it has got a budget allocation already.

Referring to the announcement made by the defence ministry on Tuesday to induct 46,000 short-term recruits in the defence forces, a government official said there will be not one but several similar orders over the next few months from other departments. But the official did not specify if those would be routed through NRA. 

“The Prime Minister’s announcement is welcome but we need a disaggregated picture of the departments/ agencies where these jobs will be created, and how the recruitment will be managed. The Seventh Pay Commission looked into the structure of central government employment in various ministries and found that most new jobs were in the paramilitary forces. It is not clear whether the net has been cast wider with Tuesday’s announcement,” said Vivek Rae, member of the Seventh Central Pay Commission. 

The second challenge is that the central and state governments have only a partial picture of the number of people they already employ. The 3.46 million employed as civilian staff in the central government, according to finance ministry documents as on March 2022, are just an approximation.

Data on the actual number of government employees are not available at a common portal.

For instance, an exercise carried out by the Seventh Central Pay Commission showed there was a discrepancy of close to 600,000 between finance ministry data and that of the Directorate General of Employment and Training.

The biggest difference was in the head counts of civilian employees in the ministry of defence and the department of posts (see table). This is not surprising as these two departments are also among the largest recruiters in the government. Despite these shortcomings, Rae agreed that the size of the central government in India, benchmarked to global peers, fell short. 

For instance, data shows the number of central government employees in India, in terms of personnel per lakh of population, at 139. This was much lower than the US where the corresponding figure is 668 (as of March 2017).

Also persons in positions at the central government as a percentage of sanctioned strength has fallen from 86 per cent in 2006 to 83 per cent in 2010. It went further down to 82 per cent by the middle of the last decade. 

Alarmed by the scale of differences, the Pay Commission, in its report, had asked the government to set up a digital database of its personnel.

“To ensure integrity and availability of consistent data on personnel in the government, the commission is of the view that the database on personnel needs to be standardised on an IT platform, across all civil ministries/departments,” it said.