Hello,

 In 2018, the Union government called applications for over sixty-thousand positions in paramilitary forces. And more than one lakh candidates were declared qualified after passing the exams, document verification, physical and medical tests. But thousands of them did not get the job even when close to 4,000 seats went vacant.

But why weren’t they hired?

The Collective takes a hard look at India's paramilitary hiring process. It delves into the secretive and flawed recruitment process for Central Armed Police Forces popularly known as paramilitary forces.

A close look at past hiring has revealed that the Modi government, which came to power promising to create 10 million jobs, trimmed advertised posts for the paramilitary midway through recruitment, which multiple high courts found fault with. The story uncovers, hitherto unknown, complicated rules that created different layers of quotas based on caste, district and state, leading to vacant seats.

For example, two students from the Dalit community will have a different cut-off mark if they come from different districts, say a Naxal district and a border district. Even if seats in a Naxal district remain vacant, qualified students from the border district will not be selected. If a state doesn’t have enough qualified candidates, the vacant seats do not go to waitlisted qualified candidates from other states.

These complexities were revealed only when the court asked the government to explain why so many seats were left vacant when the thousands of candidates the government itself had declared qualified were waiting in line.

The story also found a pattern of delays in the hiring process, violating rules, that hobbled many candidates' future. The story exposes the systemic flaws, unknown rules and discrepancies in the selection process, including candidates being selected despite failing to pass the cut-off and others being left off the merit list despite scoring higher.

It is also the story of Anita Salam and thousands like her who were tantalisingly close to landing the job. While she was away with thousands of others marching for 1000 km on the streets, sitting on a hunger strike for 72 days, and knocking on the doors of the courts to get the seats filled, her neighbours in a village in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district were taunting her family thinking she had eloped.

She couldn’t go back home without the uniform as it was her last chance.

Read the story by Hrishi Raj Anand published in The Wire.

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