Contracts will be immediately terminated if fraud is found: Director
Suhail Bhat
Srinagar, May 28: Candidates who applied for the post of Block Programme Manager (BPM) at the UMEED project of the Jammu and Kashmir Rural Livelihoods Mission (JKRLM) have made upsetting allegations of favouritism and injustice in the hiring process.
A group of applicants voiced their concerns about the fairness of the hiring process in an effort to find justice. They alleged that officials had tampered with the results in order to favour “blue-eyed” applicants while discrediting the deserving ones.
Saleem Malik, one of the affected applicants expressed his disappointment, saying: “Those of us who earned an amazing score of 27 out of 30 points were mysteriously excluded from the list, while those who received below 19 marks in the written test were included in the final selection. It appears that the less deserving candidates were given preference over the deserving ones.”
The hiring process began when M/S Vision India Private Limited issued an application call on behalf of the Jammu and Kashmir Rural Livelihoods Mission (JKRLM) under the UMEED Scheme for 30 contractual Block Programme Manager positions, beginning on December 27, 2022. The candidates said that on February 22, 2023, the candidates showed up for the online examination. Around 9:56 am on April 19, 2023, they got a call from Vision India (cell number 0112051547800) confirming their selection and promising to send them joining orders within the following two days.
The candidates provided substantial supporting documentation for their claims, including the merit list and scorecards they had obtained from Vision India, the outside agency in charge of conducting the test. They thought it was interesting that Vision India contacted applicants to confirm their eligibility for the role based on their performance in the written exam. They were shocked when their names did not appear on the final list of applicants.
“We asked the HR department for the scorecards of the three candidates they suspected the most as well as the merit list of the 30 candidates in their search for transparency and clarity. Surprisingly, the presented scorecards showed that none of the three contenders had achieved a score of 20 or above,” another applicant, Abida Ashraf, said. She also questioned why Mohammad Saleem Malik, Showkat Ali Rather, Abida Ashraf, and Shaheen Anjum were not included despite having scores above 20 (27, 27, 25, and 22, respectively).
On May 1, 2023, the candidates submitted a Right to Information (RTI) application asking for access to their scorecards in an effort to seek redress. Unfortunately, they said that despite the passage of time, the necessary information has not been supplied, which only serves to confirm their concerns. The applicants further emphasised that Vision India had previously taken down the merit and selection list that included their names and scores after it had been placed on the social media page. “When the issue was brought up, the post, which had been present until April 28th, was removed,” another applicant, Shoukat Ali, said.
Director JKRLM, Indu Kanwal Chib, denied the charges made by the candidates, claiming that the exam had been done with the utmost transparency. She emphasised a zero-tolerance approach for wrongdoing and said that the concerned departments were carefully examining the credentials of the chosen applicants. “Should any wrongdoing be uncovered, we will promptly suspend their contracts and even take into consideration blacklisting them for future employment,” she said.
When asked about the supporting documents that the candidates had brought, she urged them to submit documents for careful inspection. “Let the candidates send me the documents so that I can verify whether or not they are genuine. And we will act right away if the documents are authentic. I am here to listen and address the sincere needs of the people, and we will look into this to see if any misconduct has occurred,” she said.
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