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The general administration department(GAD) has instructed all ministers to provide it with information on vacancies in their departments

Is the Modi government getting into election mode? Assembly elections are a good 16 months away, yet the state government has initiated several populist measures. The latest in that series is the move to hire a whopping one lakh people.

The significance of the figure could be gauged from the fact that the governemnt has been able to expand the number of people in its employ by only 2.2 lakh over the last 15 years.

As the first step towards the massive hiring exercise, the general administration department has instructed all ministers to provide it with information vacancies in their departments. The ministers have to furnish the data within three days.

Sources in the chief minister’s office said that Modi has told the ministers to give their report to Urban Department Minister Nitin Patel. According to a quick estimate, a minimum of one lakh youths will get employment if all these vacancies are filled by 2012.

CMO officials pointed out that about 50,000 youths would get government jobs this year. The home department has already absorbed the highest number of youths – 12,069. This is followed by the water supply department. Once these 50,000 people are hired, the total number of state government employees will go up to 516,936. Last year, the figure was 483,118.

At present, 27 departments have 272,176 employees and the district panchayats employ 244,760. The salary bill for these employees come to about Rs 20,000 crore a month.

15,000 employees retire every year
Sources pointed out that nearly 15,000 employees retire in a year and in this financial year as many as 14,657 would go home.

Incidentally, the state government froze recruitment for a few years and though it started hiring people about three years ago, the percentage of vacant positions in the state administration has gone up to 40.

A source in the Directorate of Pension and Provided Fund said, “We sent a report to the general administration department on employees of 30 departments who are retiring over the next six years. It is a serious situation as more than 1 lakh employees will retire in six years.”

Government Employees Association coordination committee Secretary Girish Raval said, “There exists nearly 2.3 lakh vacancies in 30 departments. This accounts for about 40 per cent of the sanctioned strength. Only education department has near-normal situation right now.”

Incidentally, despite thousands of MoUs that were signed during Vibrant Gujarat Investors summits, employment generation has not increased in the state over the last eight years. According to the MoUs, 48 lakh jobs should have been created in the state.

However, In the last eight years, only 2.7 lakh people have got new jobs. The government’s own report says that the Vibrant summits have failed to have any impact on employment generation.

In fact, the total number of employment is less than that if a 15-year span is considered. In 1995, the number of people on the government roll was 17,19,099. In 2010, the figure has risen to 19,40,002, representing a creation of only 2.2 lakh new jobs.

Source: TOI