JAMMU: After months of chaos and uncertainty, the Jammu and Kashmir Service Selection Board (JKSSB) has announced the conduct of the examination for 1200 posts of Sub Inspector, Jammu and Kashmir Police tentatively in December 2022, five months after it scrapped the earlier recruitment drive after irregularities including the leak of question paper.
Only few among those who featured in the earlier selection list would be happy with the SSB notification, which said that the final dates of examination would be notified separately in due course of time. However, tens of thousands of those who had raised the question on the recruitment drive by the board have hailed the leadership of Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, who has not only ensured transparency and accountability, but has acted on every complaint his office has received.
As the administration gets lauded, youth prepares for the examination, the recruiting agency, JKSSB suffers from an institutional credibility crisis, restoring which is a Himalayan task.
3 Decades Of Neglect
For decades altogether, the Service Selection Board, the premier recruitment agency of Jammu and Kashmir remained a completely neglected and ignored institution. With Iqbal Khandey’s punishment posting way back in 2001 by an angry Farooq Abdullah, the deployment of officers to JKSSB has made the board a dumping yard.
“Despite tall claims of Farooq Abdullah, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, none of the governments ever paid attention to such a sensitive institution that we didn’t even have our own building,” said an official.
The board has suffered for long from staff deficiency, both in terms of quantity and quality, even as scores of vacant posts have affected the functioning of the board, which was overloaded with the work, courtesy the government’s accelerated recruitment drive.
However, things started looking up for the better post August 2019, with a new constitutional environment setting in and new parameters of accountability being introduced.
