Kozhikode: Government jobs are sought-after by the youth. For generations lakhs of youths have been taking public exams that would qualify them for these jobs in various state government departments. But such jobs are apparently drying up in Kerala as the figures on recruitments conducted by the Public Service Commission and state salary accounts since 2016 indicate. Much to the chagrin of job-seekers, even appointments are rarely conducted against vacancies caused by retirement of government servants.

The documents obtained through Right to Information Act clearly show that not even one lakh people had received appointment in various state government departments during the last five years. This is at variance with the propaganda of the Left Democratic Government that it had provided 1.5 lakh jobs since it came to power in 2016.

The chief minister and ministers had claimed that the government could give advice memo to 151,513 people in the last nearly 5 years coinciding with the rule of the Pinarayi Vijayan government.

With people getting advice memo for more than one jobs, this figure put out by the government cannot be construed as the actual number of people recruited to various state government departments.

The government is not willing to make public the details of people who have been recruited in this period. Even questions regarding this in the Legislative Assembly elicited vague replies. Most times the ministers replied that the government is in the process of collecting details!

As no definite information was forthcoming on the exact number of jobs data from the salary software system, called Spark, was assessed by Shajar Khan, the state secretary of the Save Education Committee.

It was found that from June 2016 to February 2021 salaries were disbursed from new Spark accounts to 109,585 people. However, among the new recruits 14,389 are aided school teachers. As the latter are appointed by the managing bodies of respective schools, in effect 95 196 people had secured jobs in the state service through the PSC.

Even the vacancies arising out of retirements were not filled up during the last five years according to the available data. On an average each year about 20,000 people had retired during this period. If these vacancies are added up with the newly created posts then the appointments should have been more than double.