Jammu and Kashmir has over three lakh registered jobless while forty thousand government posts sit empty, exposing a broken recruitment machine.
For decades, the government was the employer of last resort in Jammu and Kashmir. Every family with a graduate expected, eventually, a government job. That compact held even through insurgency and curfew. It broke after 2019.
The numbers now tell an uncomfortable story. More than 3.20 lakh job seekers are registered on the region’s employment portal, most of them presumably qualified, many well-read. At the same time, 40,672 posts lie vacant under direct recruitment across government departments. This is not a shortage of jobs. It is a failure to fill the jobs that exist.
Two recruiting bodies, the Public Service Commission and the Services Selection Board, exist precisely to close this gap. Between them, they received close to 20,000 referrals over two years, yet selections have crawled. Barely 11,465 candidates were selected across two and a half years. Advertisements pile up faster than appointments follow. In last two years, the twin recruiters collected Rs 82,45,40,800 in examination and application fees.
The human cost is starkest in health. Nearly 12,800 posts lie vacant in the Health and Medical Education Department alone, including almost 2,900 doctors and over 9,700 nurses and paramedics. Hospitals across Srinagar, Jammu, Anantnag, Baramulla and beyond run short-staffed while patients queue. School Education is not far behind, with nearly 10,000 vacant posts. A government that cannot staff its hospitals and schools is a government failing at its most basic obligations, whatever else it claims to deliver.
This is, in truth, two crises wearing one face. On one side stands a generation of young, educated job seekers, women among them in growing numbers, watching applications vanish into bureaucratic silence. On the other stands a government apparatus too slow, too tangled in rules and referrals, to convert sanctioned vacancies into working employees. Officials point to court cases, rule amendments and departmental restructuring as reasons for delay. These explanations may be technically accurate. They are not an answer to a nurse missing from a ward or a teacher missing from a classroom.
The government insists it has built a time-bound mechanism, that vacancies are reviewed periodically at the highest level. If so, the results have yet to reach the districts. Anantnag, with the highest number of registered job seekers in the Valley, deserves more than assurances. So does every patient waiting on an unstaffed ward. In fact all the 14 ventilators in district hospital Baramulla are not working.
Filling a post is not a favour to the unemployed. It is the state doing its job. Until referral becomes appointment, and appointment becomes service delivered, Jammu and Kashmir will keep producing two casualties from one failure: the jobless graduate and the citizen denied care.
