TS jobs notification gets delayed

The wait for Telangana government’s job notifications is getting longer as the state Cabinet has failed to arrive at a consensus on the exact number of vacancies existing in various government departments even after a nine-month exercise by officials and ministers.

Although the issue of job notifications came up for discussion again in the previous Cabinet meeting held on September 16, no approval was given. The Cabinet discussed job notifications four times since June and it even met for two days in a row in July to finalise job vacancies, but nothing materialised so far.

This delay is costing the job aspirants dearly as they are exceeding their upper age limit with no job notifications issued since 2018.

As many as 30 lakh job seekers have registered their names with Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC) since 2018 to apply for various recruitment exams once job notifications are issued.

Of them, around three lakh candidates have exceeded their upper age limit of 34 years and became ineligible to appear for recruitment exams, according to students and unemployed organisations. These organisations are demanding that the government raise the upper age limit by five years or 10 years to give them eligibility for exams.

Earlier, the government cited reasons like formation of new districts, new zones, new multizones for recruitment and reservations, delay in granting approval to new zonal system by the Centre for the delay in issuing notifications.

But all these hurdles have been cleared by the Centre in April this year. The state government even completed the process of categorising all vacancies as district, zone and multi-zone wise posts in July.

Officials submitted a report to the Cabinet in July stating that there were 44,022 vacancies in government departments and 12,957 posts in various other institutions, adding up to 56,979 vacancies.

The Cabinet was not satisfied with this report and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao asked finance minister T. Harish Rao and Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar to re-examine the vacancies and submit a final report in a week.

The Harish Rao-led committee again submitted revised vacancy details numbering over

55,000 to the Cabinet in August first week. The report has been lying with the Chief Minister since then.

The Chief Minister had announced to fill

50,000 vacancies soon in December 2020. The upper age limit was increased by 10 years from 34 years to 44 years by the Telangana government in 2015 since no major job notifications were released due to statehood agitation between 2009 and

2014.

However, the age relaxation was applicable for a period of one year. But the government failed to release major notifications in 2015 and 2016 due to which it extended the 10 years upper age relaxation by three more years till 2019.

The age relaxation period ended on July 26,

2019 bringing down the upper age limit to 34 years again.