CBI judge Vinod Kumar, who was concerned only with this particular case, may be absolutely right to convict the high-profile gang involved in recruitment of 3,200-odd junior teachers through a well-oiled illegal job-selling process, but few will disagree that the practice exists across the country and across governments.

In fact, corruption and bribery in recruitment don’t rest only with government job, they are rampant even in large private sector companies using so-called professional head-hunting or placement firms to employ people at all levels – from unskilled and skilled workers, security servicemen, management trainees to senior management positions, including corporate directors. The annual mass recruitment of management trainees and probationers in Shaw Wallace under the late M R Chhabria with the help of a Kolkata-based national placement agency and nearly mass exit of those recruits failing to qualify the grade at the end of their respective terms reached a scandalous proportion in the heady days of the giant liquor-to-FMCG company in the 1980s and ‘90s. The job racket, which is common in many companies across the country, is run by those rogue corporate management and their HR heads in connivance with placement agencies. These agencies share agreed portions of their fee income from successful job placement with those unscrupulous corporate management staff.

However, nothing can beat the government machinery in the practice of job racket, including appointment, promotion, transfer, placement and the award of contract. For a long time, Indian Railways, the country’s largest departmental business undertaking with some 1.4 million employees on its roll, has been at the centre of opposition criticism for political hiring of personnel — directly or indirectly through railway supply and service contractors — under the patronage of its minister-in-charge. It existed even before the era of A B A Ghani Khan Chowdhury. The practice continued. Not all jobs came free to so-called party workers and followers of the minister-in-charge in his or her state. Agents, mostly informal political party ‘appointees’, collected from recruits Rs. 3-5 lakh per job. The amount so collected was believed to be meant for bolstering the minister’s party coffer.

Historically, the single largest public sector job racket, involving politicians, private agents and corporate management, was linked with Bokaro Steel Limited (BSL), now a SAIL plant, in the early 1970s when nearly 15,000 people were recruited by the company in various trades in a span of only a few months. Most of them had reportedly obtained fake certificates of age, academic qualification and technical expertise in required trades from private employment service agents based at a small town called Marafari, located on the way to Bokaro from Dhanbad. Local people made a fun of it calling the place Marafari ‘university’. Years later, it was ‘revealed’ that in some cases employees at the Bokaro steel plant had retired from service in the normal course while their ‘underaged’ fathers still working in the plant.

For many years, it has been an open secret that top PSU jobs were often ‘auctioned’ to the highest ‘bidder’ among the short-listed candidates. The practice began in the 1970s. The departmental ministry played an important role in the appointment of PSU directors and CMDs. Such appointees were often allegedly ‘required’ to raise contributions from large contractors and suppliers to the ruling political party through concerned departmental minister. Several former PSU chief executives faced CBI enquiries on charges of financial misappropriation, or, in other words, making more money for themselves than meeting their fund obligation to their political bosses. The post-Emergency, the Shah Commission had implicated the chairman of public sector MMTC for raising funds for the Congress party out of ‘illegal’ commission collected from Japanese importers of iron ore from India at the national cost. MMTC was the iron ore export canalizing agency, then. Das, the MMTC chairman, managed to flee the country for shelter in Switzerland to avoid arrest and further grilling by the commission. Transfers and postings of revenue service men – from income tax, customs and central excise – to and from Bombay (now Mumbai) were believed to come for a price as in the case of all inspector-level state police appointments at ‘high-weekly-collection-potential’ stations.

Junior level school appointments are a huge fund source for ruling political parties in almost every state. In poorer states having huge unemployment such as West Bengal, a school teacher’s job may cost an applicant as low as Rs. 80,000 to Rs. 1.5 lakh as ‘donation’ depending upon the salary scale and the prospective appointee’s ability to pay. Some school authorities are said to be allowing their newly appointed teachers the facility of ‘installment payment’ of ‘donations’ over a period of up to one year from the date of appointment. Such ‘installments’ are always unofficially cut at source with the receiver acknowledging the receipt of full salary. There are states which have been recruiting tens of thousands of primary and secondary school teachers before every panchayat and state election and a good number of them against prescribed ‘donation.’

Actually, the Haryana job-for-cash scandal for recruitment of junior school teachers may be much bigger than what the CBI has trampled into. The demand for steady jobs is driving educated youth to extreme frustration across the country. Given the genesis of corruption in the government, politicians and bureaucrats of all sorts have been fully exploiting the growing frustration of unemployment among the youth. The Chautala case, if held good by the upper judiciary in case of an appeal against the CBI judge order, may be just a tip in the iceberg in so far as the state-sponsored job racket is concerned. (IPA Service)