More than a year after the special status of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) was revoked and the State made a Union Territory, the administration has identified over 22,000 government jobs but recruitment is yet to take place. No person from outside J&K has purchased land in the UT so far, according to information provided by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to a parliamentary panel.
The panel was informed that the vacant jobs include only 533 gazetted posts and 21,846 Class IV posts.
J&K has been under Central rule since June 2018 and was made a UT on August 6, 2019. On August 28, 2019, then J&K Governor Satyapal Malik said the government had identified 50,000 government jobs and vacancies would be filled soon.
In a report tabled in Parliament in March 2020, the number of such vacancies stood at over 84,000.
In a report tabled in the Rajya Sabha on March 15, the MHA said the government of J&K constituted an Accelerated Recruitment Committee (ARC) to identify vacancies and fill them on immediate basis. “The Committee in the Phase-I identified 10,000 Class-IV vacancies across various departments, out of which 8,575 have already been put to advertisement by the Board …As part of Phase-II of Accelerated Recruitment Drive, the Committee has identified 12,379 Gazetted and Non-Gazetted vacancies which comprises 533 Gazetted and 11,846 Non-Gazetted vacancies. Out of these, 383 Gazetted and 7,433 Non Gazetted vacancies have already been referred to the recruiting agencies,” the report said.
The report said that the J&K government had received memoranda of understanding (MoUs) for 18 private hospitals with investment of ₹3,200 crore and 33 proposals with an investment of ₹2,100 crore in the education sector.
The panel was informed that agricultural land was being protected in J&K on similar lines as that of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. “However, the land has been opened up for industries [in the latter States].”
“This has been one of the reasons why J&K, unlike Himachal and Uttarakhand, has not benefited from any industrial package in the past because till one has title to a land, industry cannot be set up,” the report said.
It said that a land bank of 6,000 acres is “contemplated to be developed” for industries, of which “3,000 acres of land have already been identified.”
When the panel enquired about the number of proposals of investment received in the UT of J&K since its creation and purchase of land by people from outside the State, it was informed that “456 MoUs have been signed amounting to ₹23,152.17 crore”. “Further, no person from outside has purchased land in J&K, since the industrial land allotment policy is in formulation and land allotment has not commenced,” the report said.
In a separate reply in Rajya Sabha on March 17, Union Minister of State for Home G. Kishan Reddy said that around 3,800 Kashmiri migrant candidates had returned to Kashmir in the last few years to take up jobs under the Prime Minister’s rehabilitation package.
“Post-abrogation of Article 370, as many as 520 migrant candidates have returned to Kashmir for taking up the jobs provided under the rehabilitation package. Another nearly 2,000 migrant candidates are likely to return under the same policy in 2021 on successful completion of the selection process,” the reply said. It said that as per the report of the Relief Office set up in 1990 by the government of J&K, 44,167 Kashmiri migrant families — who had to move from the Valley since 1990 due to security concerns — are registered. “Of these, the count of registered Hindu migrant families is 39,782,” it said.
