In Jammu and Kashmir, the state workforce is shrinking fast as recruitment slows and contractual hiring rises. As the salaries decline, pensions soar, unemployment grows, the welfare state is gradually turning into a cost-saving administrative machine, writes Masood Hussain
For decades, Jammu and Kashmir was synonymous with a government job. A “permanent post” was not merely a livelihood but a symbol of prestige and certainty in an uncertain economy. In the absence of an impressive private sector, the state was the single largest employer, paying salaries that ran the region’s consumption engine, lifted entire families, and sustained the idea of the welfare state.
That social contract is now being rewritten. Government jobs are still aspirational, but they are also vanishing. Brides waiting for a groom with a government job may have to wait further. Recruitment has slowed, vacancies remain unfilled, and the state’s employment pyramid has started to invert. The latest data show a system that is quietly turning from a welfare provider into a cost-saving administrative machine.
The Great Shrinking
In 2019-20, Jammu and Kashmir’s combined workforce, government departments, public sector undertakings, aided institutions, and local bodies, stood at over 5.29 lakh employees. By 2023-24, it was down to 4.14 lakh. And in the latest financial year 2024-25, the total dropped sharply to 2,81,350, a contraction of nearly 32 per cent in one year.
The most dramatic decline was in the government sector itself. The number of government employees fell from 361,000 to 234,000, a loss of 127,000 posts, the steepest decline in recent memory. Public sector employees also declined from 34,460 to 25,679, a drop of nearly 25 per cent.
Only local bodies showed growth; employment there rose by 45 per cent, reflecting a modest decentralisation of governance under new municipal and panchayat-level schemes. But these gains are too small to offset the overall downsizing of the state apparatus.
The headline reason is structural: the transfer of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, one of the region’s largest departments with over 1.3 lakh personnel, to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Their salaries and pensions no longer figure in the Union Territory’s books. Yet even accounting for that administrative change, the overall trend is clear: the government is shrinking its direct employment footprint.
Jammu and Kashmir was already facing considerable criticism for hiring too many people. Comparisons were being drawn with other hill states where populations were big, but the number of employees was smaller. The erstwhile state government, dominated by the native parties, were never in a position to change the policy because it would impact their political futures. Post-2019, when the erstwhile state was sliced into two federally governed union territories, all these “reforms” were fast-forwarded because there was no native resistance.
The Fiscal Flip
The change is not just in numbers but in the financial composition of the government itself. For the first time in years, the salary bill has fallen, while the pension bill has exploded.
Between 2016-17 and 2023-24, the salary expenditure of the Jammu and Kashmir government nearly doubled, from Rs 15,122 crore to Rs 29,380 crore, driven by pay commission revisions and inflation-linked increments. Then came the contraction. In 2024-25, salaries fell to Rs 23,100 crore, a drop of 21.4 per cent, or Rs 6,280 crore, marking one of the sharpest declines in public wage spending anywhere in India.
By contrast, pensions and gratuities tell an opposite story. In 2016-17, the pension bill was Rs 4,216 crore. By 2024-25, it ballooned to Rs 14,805 crore, a 251 per cent increase. For 2025-26, the estimated pension bill is Rs 15,300 crore, only slightly below the projected salary outlay of Rs 23,894 crore. It means that of the Rs 39,194 crore that Jammu and Kashmir would be spending on the human resource, working and retired, 39 per cent will go to pensions.
This inversion has deep fiscal implications. In less than a decade, pensions have grown from one-third to nearly two-thirds of the salary expenditure. The gap that once exceeded Rs 10,000 crore has narrowed to just Rs 8,000 crore. Jammu and Kashmir is effectively spending almost as much on its retirees as on its serving employees.
Every year, about 10,000 government employees retire, but fewer recruits follow. The salary bill thus flattens, while the pension bill keeps rising. A welfare state that once prided itself on employing people now spends more money supporting those it no longer employs.
Contractual Governance
Walk into a district hospital or a government college in Kashmir today, and you will meet the new face of public employment, the contractual employee.
In Kashmir’s health sector alone, 11,496 doctors and paramedics currently serve the region. But only 6,337 of them are regular employees. The remaining 5,159 are on short-term contracts, many under centrally sponsored schemes like National Health Mission (NHM). They have no paid leave, no pension, and no provident fund deduction. They work like labourers, and since their output and performance is linked to the certificates issued by their regular counterparts, sometimes, some of them end up working for them too, holding some of their responsibilities.
The numbers tell the scale of dependence: 3,181 regular posts and 557 contractual posts are currently vacant in health services, yet the government continues to extend temporary contracts instead of making regular appointments.
In the education sector, the picture is similar. Each academic year, nearly 3000 of contractual teachers are appointed for a six-month session. Under the ‘academic arrangement’, they teach entire batches of students and are then sent home, only to be reappointed the next year under a fresh contract. Many have spent decades like this, loyal to a department that refuses to regularise them.
Even in higher education, thousands of positions remain vacant. Across the nine operational medical colleges in Jammu and Kashmir, 4,886 posts, from faculty to paramedical staff, are still unfilled. The cycle of temporary hiring keeps the system running but deprives employees of long-term security and the state of institutional continuity.
A system that was introduced before them was slightly better. In the school education, the government would appoint Rehbar-e-Taleem, a temporary teacher, who would get regularised as a formal teacher after putting in five years and offering clear data of his performance. That system has now been abandoned, only to be replaced by the contractual, albeit in the higher education sector.
Jammu and Kashmir is grappling with a deep social crisis arising from the plight of daily wagers, thousands of men and women appointed over the years by politicians and policymakers to perform essential duties in service and welfare departments. Earlier, a daily wager would be regularised automatically after completing seven uninterrupted years of service, but that system was later discontinued.
Today, nearly 1,00,501 daily wagers continue to work without job security or benefits. They sustain the most basic public services, powering the electricity network, maintaining water supply, managing rivers, and performing vital yet low-paid duties in hospitals and municipalities. Entire families have been raised on the promise that one day their breadwinners would be made permanent employees, a dream that remains unfulfilled. What began as a temporary employment measure has now evolved into a full-blown social crisis, breaking homes and breeding despair. Successive governments have acknowledged the problem, but none have managed to resolve it.
The Educated Jobless
The shrinking public payroll has collided with a growing pool of educated youth. Official data lists 3,61,146 educated unemployed persons in Jammu and Kashmir, including 2,33,845 men and 1,27,301 women. The Kashmir division alone accounts for 2.08 lakh of them.
These numbers make Jammu and Kashmir one of the most unemployed regions in India in proportion to its workforce. The situation is especially grim among professionals – 555 medical graduates, 252 dental graduates, and 9,416 engineering postgraduates have registered as unemployed. There are 815 engineering positions in Jammu and Kashmir’s power sector lying vacant for years. In the Road and Buildings department, the vacant engineer positions are at 1586.
This mismatch between qualifications and available jobs fuels frustration and dependence. For many, a government post remains the only dream worth chasing, even if the dream itself is shrinking.
Recruitment as Revenue
Paradoxically, while regular jobs are shrinking, the recruitment process itself has become a sort of an industry. The twin agencies, Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission (JKPSC), which recruits gazetted positions and the Jammu and Kashmir Services Selection Board (JKSSB), which is mandated to recruit non-gazetted positions, collected Rs 77.09 crore in fees from job applicants between March 2016 and September 2020. Since October 2024, they have earned another Rs 31.75 crore.
Each announcement of vacancies attracts lakhs of aspirants, even when the number of actual posts is in the hundreds. The result is a massive revenue churn for the state, but not much employment on the ground. Recruitment has become more of a symbolic process than an economic equaliser. The twin organisations do not hold the interviews on their own. They hire non-native agencies that conduct tests for them, and their operations have already created a series of rackets in the last five years, one of them investigated by a federal investigator, the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI).
Shrinking Open Space
Another factor reshaping the employment landscape is the expansion of reservations. Right now, less than 40 per cent of government jobs in Jammu and Kashmir fall under the open merit category. The rest are reserved for various social, regional, and economic categories.
While the objective of affirmative action remains valid, the cumulative effect has been a shrinking space for open competition. With fewer jobs available overall and a smaller open quota, opportunities for the general pool of candidates have narrowed drastically.
Responding to a massive backlash, the Omar Abdullah government constituted a cabinet sub-committee to review these quotas under a “rationalisation” process. However, its report is yet to be made public, and nobody knows if it will alter the balance. In a region already reeling under high unemployment, the debate over who gets to compete at all has become as contentious as the scarcity of jobs themselves.
A Nationwide Shift
The shift in Jammu and Kashmir mirrors a broader trend in India’s public employment policy. Across ministries and states, regular recruitment has been replaced by contractual hiring and outsourced services.
The government now increasingly functions like a corporate entity: it wants flexibility without liability. Under the New Pension System (NPS) introduced in 2004, all new employees contribute to their own retirement corpus, ending the guarantee of a defined pension. At the same time, automation has eroded clerical and support positions once considered permanent fixtures of the bureaucracy.
The result is a leaner but more impersonal administration, efficient on paper, precarious in practice. Jammu and Kashmir’s transformation is simply a more intense version of what the rest of India has been experiencing in slow motion.
A Fading Welfare State
The fiscal logic behind this shift is hard to dispute. A smaller workforce means a smaller salary bill and fewer liabilities. But the social cost is harder to quantify.
For a region where the government once served as the backbone of the economy, reduced employment means reduced purchasing power, weaker local markets, and diminished social mobility. Government salaries were the engine of household spending, from groceries to tuition fees, weddings to healthcare. Their decline is not just an administrative fact; it is an economic contraction felt across bazaars and mohallas.
The state’s move toward “minimum government, maximum governance” has also introduced a cultural shift. The sarkari job, once a lifelong identity, is now a short-term engagement, uncertain, performance-driven, and disposable. The old notion of the “permanent employee” is fast becoming a relic.
Machines Over Men
Digital governance, once introduced as an efficiency measure, has also become a quiet instrument of workforce reduction. File movements that once required multiple clerks are now processed online. Birth certificates, land records, and tax documents are generated automatically. Most of banking is mechanical, from ATMs at one end and loan processing apps on the other end.
Departments that earlier employed hundreds now run with a handful of technical staff. Even the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, which remains the region’s largest financial institution, has more than one-third of its staff as peons, many of whom have little role left in a system dominated by digital banking.
Technology has replaced redundancy, but it has also erased livelihoods. The administrative structure is becoming leaner, but not necessarily more humane.
A Miser State
At its core, the transformation of Jammu and Kashmir’s employment landscape reveals a philosophical change. The government no longer sees itself as an employer of last resort but as a cost-optimising manager. It wants to save money, reduce pension liabilities, and keep the fiscal deficit under control, even if that means abandoning the social character that defined it for decades.
The contradiction is glaring. The same state that claims to be a welfare-oriented administration now behaves like a businessman, outsourcing essential services to contractual workers while cutting long-term commitments. The numbers are improving on paper, but the human costs are rising outside the spreadsheets.
Economists call it “administrative rationalisation.” The phrase masks the human story beneath: of clerks who will not be replaced, of teachers on revolving contracts, of hospitals run by temporary doctors. Retirements are allowed to reduce the workforce naturally, and recruitment drives are delayed or downsized.
Even decentralisation, seen in the growing employment under local bodies, comes with strings attached. Panchayat and municipal employees are often hired on honorarium or fixed pay, far below regular wage standards. Governance continues, but at a fraction of the old cost and with none of the old stability.
A Future of Fewer Jobs
The road ahead is uncertain. On one hand, Jammu and Kashmir’s policymakers argue that rationalisation is necessary to maintain fiscal health and prevent the salary-pension spiral from crowding out development spending. On the other hand, the social contract that binds the people to the state is fraying.
Can a region with more than 3.6 lakh educated unemployed afford to shrink its only major source of employment? Can digital efficiency replace the economic and social stability that public jobs once ensured?
The answers are not easy. What is clear is that the sarkari job, that defining dream of a generation, is becoming rarer, shorter, and less secure. The welfare state that once guaranteed livelihoods now counts its savings instead.
Jammu and Kashmir is entering a post-bureaucratic phase, with fewer permanent jobs, more contractual work, soaring pensions, and expanding digital governance. The transformation is reshaping not just the state’s finances but its very relationship with its people.
A government that once prided itself on employing everyone now aspires to employ no one permanently. A welfare state has turned into a fiscal machine.
The question that remains is whether this machine, efficient and controlled, can still hold together the social fabric woven by generations of public employees. Or whether, in the pursuit of savings, it will lose the human touch that once defined governance in Jammu and Kashmir.
