Ever since the formation of Telangana state and Telangana Rashtra Samithi formed the first government in the new state seven years ago, the unemployed youth in the state had been waiting for the filling of vacancies in various government departments.
But there had hardly been any recruitments in the state in the last seven years, except a few thousand by the Telangana state public service commission.
Forget about filling up the vacancies, there has been no information as to how many government jobs are vacant in the state.
In February this year, the first Pay Revision Commission headed by retired IAS officer C R Biswal came out with the actual statistics of the vacancies in various government departments.
According to the report, there are as many as 1.91 lakh posts lying vacant in the total number of 31 departments in the Telangana government.
The total sanctioned strength of the government is 4,91,304 employees, but at present, there are only 3,00,178 employees, which means there are a little over 1.91 lakh posts lying vacant in various departments, which is 39 per cent of the total strength.
The school education department has the highest number of employees, majority of them being teachers.
Out of the total sanctioned strength of 1,37,651, there are only 1,13,853 employees in this department, which means there are nearly 24,000 vacancies.
In the police department, which has the second highest number of employee strength, there are 61,212 employees as against the sanctioned strength of 98,394 – so, there are 37,000 vacancies.
In medical and health department, there are more than 30,000 vacancies.
Similarly, there are nearly 9,000 vacancies in the revenue department and 13,000 in the panchayat raj and rural development department.
The commission listed out these figures based on the statistics provided by the officials of the various departments.
But at the cabinet meeting held at Pragathi Bhavan on Wednesday, the officials came up with a different picture.
They presented a report to chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao stating that there were only 56,979 vacancies in various government departments to be filled up to the cabinet.
According to them, the home department (police) accounts for the maximum number of 21,507 vacancies, followed by medical and health department with 10,048 vacancies, higher education department with 3,825 vacancies, BC welfare department with 3,538 vacancies etc.
The Information Technology department has the least number of only four vacancies.
So, which is correct? The Biswal Commission report or the Cabinet note? And the latest press statement from the CMO quotes KCR as saying that his government is going to fill up 50,000 vacancies over a period of time.
It clearly shows the actual figures are being suppressed!