New drive launched to fill vacant reserved posts

With the backlog vacancies for reserved categories showing no signs of declining, the government has launched another special recruitment drive to fill the nearly 60,000 posts lying vacant in the Central government.

With the backlog vacancies for reserved categories showing no signs of declining, the government has launched another special recruitment drive to fill the nearly 60,000 posts lying vacant in the Central government.

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The drive covers posts reserved for scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST), other backward classes (OBC) and the disabled that were not filled during routine recruitment.

“The government launched the drive following a review of the vacancy position in these categories by the minister of state for personnel, public grievances and pension V Narayanasamy recently,” the department of personnel and training (DoPT) spokesperson Ravinder Singh said.

Singh said that all ministries have been directed to fill all the vacant posts in these categories by March 31, 2012.

Two Special Recruitment Drives — one for SCs, STs and OBCs, and another for people with disabilities (PWD) — were launched in 2008 and 2009 respectively.

The drives enabled various offices to fill up about 26,750 vacancies. But it wasn’t able to significantly reduce the size of the backlog due to difficulties in filling new vacancies.

A government official said that a big challenge was to keep track of the pace of filling up the vacancies at a Central level due to delays in receiving updated information.A meeting convened by the DoPT this week will send a strong message to all Central departments as well as ministries that have till now failed to stick to deadlines to keep the department posted.

The decision to convene the meeting follows the Parliamentary Committee on Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes expressing displeasure at the incomplete statistics available with DoPT.

“The Cabinet Secretariat has also taken note of this issue,” a DoPT memo said, while convening the meeting for this week.