(This is the ninth and final part of the Malayala Manorama series 'Government Jobs: Playbook of Nexus and Nepotism'. Read Part 1 here: Backdoor appointments cost the public money and the government its face. Part 2: In Kerala’s IT department, job offers come tailor-made for candidates. Part 3: New-age commissars rule Chief Minister’s Office. Part 4: Public sector management is family business in Kerala. Part 5: Nepotism runs from top to bottom. Part 6: Contracts of injustice: Favourites in, common man out. Part 7: The mirage of Kerala PSC rank list: How candidates are left to live in hope. Part 8: From peon to deputy secretary, a 'phenomenal rise' aided by a fake certificate.)

Every avatar comes with a purpose. They persist until their mission is fulfilled. Taking over as chief minister in 2016, Pinarayi Vijayan promised to keep the avatars away from the corridors of power. However, avatars quietly sneaked into his office and the offices of the other ministers. When curbs were put in place to block avatars from entering the secretariat, insiders took up those roles. The Industries Minister had to go on a clean-up drive of his office after his own staff started fighting each other for dominance. Some of them were shown the door but many still rule the roost in the minister’s office.

The 20 ministers in Kerala have 480 personal staff among them, or 24 staff members per minister on average. Private secretaries and additional private secretaries take home a monthly salary ranging from Rs 77,400 to Rs 1.25 lakh. Two years of service will make them eligible for lifelong pensions. So almost all ministers in successive governments appoint a set of personal staff for the initial two years and another set for the remainder of the term. The practice makes about 1,000 people eligible for government pension every five years. The government spends more than Rs 2 crore every month for maintaining the workforce of personal staff for ministers. For comparison, even central ministers are left with only half of the personal staff members.

Every minister will have a trusted confidant in his personal staff privy to both official and personal lives of the minister. The close proximity often leads that key member to think that he is as powerful as the minister. That moment of exultation is the birth of the avatar. The party in power often suggests efficient workers as private secretaries to its ministers but they are helpless when faced with the powers of the avatar in the ministerial office. Many ministers have to cope with the intense groupism among their own personal staff. Many of the staffers have lost their jobs thanks to the weight thrown around by avatars. They would then usher in their own people to the staff.

A former lift operator in the Vikas Bhavan has elevated himself to the post of an additional private secretary in the secretariat, drawing a salary equal to a deputy secretary in the government service. He was never required to present his credentials to rise up in power. An avatar in the Legislative Assembly was recently kicked out after unfavourable news reports.

Under lens

The government took its own sweet time to probe the antecedents of a person who was appointed as the managing director of a public sector unit under the Department of Non-Resident Keralites Affairs last year. The principal secretary in the department wrote to the additional director general of police in charge of intelligence to check if the managing director with connections in the United Arab Emirates had faced any cases. The precaution was spurred by the linking of several powerful people to the recent bust of a gold smuggling racket in Thiruvananthapuram.

The proposal to appoint the person as a managing director on a contract basis was mooted before the cabinet in September. The appointment order was issued on October 1. Though the person was cleared of any criminal history by the Vigilance Department, the Norka is now forced to double check.

Incidentally, the Norka is loaded with temporary employees appointed for the conduct of the extravagant expatriate meeting called Loka Kerala Sabha.

All parties unite

When it comes to unauthorised appointments, there is no divide among political parties. A party might launch a crusade against the practice while in opposition, but it would do precious little to remove the wrongly appointed people when it comes to power. A person who had managed to land a plum post in the Transport Commissionerate without any qualifications had been clinging to the job until recently. He even managed to get his own people find jobs in the Commissionerate. Some of them did so on the back of fake degree certificates. When the shameful incident was exposed the government had to sit up and take a note. A vigilance probe implicated the powerful person too. He was sacked a couple of months ago.

One of the prerequisites for getting a job as an assistant motor vehicle inspector in the Transport Department is a year’s experience in a workshop. Many of the candidates pay up to get this certificate, insiders have told us. The bribe could be anywhere between Rs 40,000 and Rs 80,000. Even government employees had faked their time in workshops to get appointed to the post of the assistant motor vehicle inspector, a vigilance probe had found out.

Though the Vizhinjam port’s work is snail-paced, contract appointments have been fast-tracked. As many as six persons have found jobs with the project, including the former gunman of an influential leader.

Some of the candidates who were left out in the recruitment of guest lecturers to the Folklore Department of the University of Calicut decided to do a little digging. They raised some queries under the Right to Information Act, but the response they got was an indication of the inner workings of typical officialdom. The information was declined as it was “confidential and trust-based”.

No backtracking

Can a company which indulged in irregularities in a contract with the government expect to get another public contract? The government is not prepared to rule out the possibility. That explains the opposition charges that consultancy contracts are a cover-up for scams involving influential persons.

The Kerala State IT Infrastructure Limited (KSITIL), which is in charge of the Space Park and K Phone, has a soft corner for PwC. There has been no decision to withdraw the contract with PwC with regard to K Phone, even as the multinational consultancy stands accused of colluding with former IT secretary M Sivasankar in appointments to publicly funded posts.

PwC has been excluded only from a contract with the Space Park, where the consultancy had referred for appointment Swapna Suresh, an accused in the gold smuggling case. The persisting link is strange as the KSITIL managing director had lodged a police complaint against PwC for trying to deceive the organisation by referring a person with criminal antecedents and a fake degree.

Even as the Transport Department is preparing to sever its ties with PwC, the KSITIL is in no mood for a rethink. PwC consultants have been working on the K Phone project since 2018. Sivasankar was the chairman of a committee tasked with forming the project management unit for K Phone.  The then KSITIL managing director had asked the government to consider PwC for the project as a long-term partner.

KILA fellow

The practice of tweaking professional requirements for high posts in accordance with the qualifications of influential candidates is going to be a regular feature in the Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA). The move to form two posts – senior urban fellow and urban fellow – to the urban study centre of the KILA has come under a scanner. The creation of the posts, rather than the mandatory senior professor and assistant professor, is viewed as an attempt to favour candidates with CPM connections and without the required qualifications.

Anyone who is appointed as a chair professor, senior professor and assistant professor has to have the basic qualification of a post-graduate degree and PhD as per KILA norms. When the notifications were issued for the vacancies, the requirements were relaxed for all posts except that of the chair professor. The other two posts were converted to fellows and the basic qualification was changed to a post-graduate course.

The salary scale was kept intact though.

The Kerala Public Service Commission has set a threshold of 40 marks for candidates applying for the post of legal assistants. Strangely enough, last-grade employees in the secretariat who hardly secured 10 marks have been appointed to the post bypassing the public recruiter, thanks to their connections with the employees’ unions.

Nobody dares challenge the illegal appointments. Any challenger will have to face a rumour campaign, followed by a cyber attack and even physical assaults. Such underhand dealings are commonplace in the secretariat, where the last-grade employees are always at the helm of the union affiliated to the ruling party.

The backdoor appointments of poorly qualified persons as legal assistants have been a regular practice in the secretariat for quite some time. The modus operandi to eat into the open quota is to create artificial vacancies to the post of assistant. As many as 565 candidates who found their ways to the Kerala Public Service Commission rank list are waiting for job offers while last-grade employees in the OA section of the secretariat with poor marks in the test quietly walk away with the jobs.

(Reporting by Renji Kuriakose, Mahesh Guptan, V R Prathap, S V Rajesh, M R Harikumar, K P Safeena and Jikku Varghese Jacob)