Peerzada Masarat Shah
A society advances not merely through roads, bridges and infrastructure, but through the credibility of its institutions. Public trust is the invisible foundation on which governance rests, and once that trust is shaken, even the most ambitious development agenda struggles to carry conviction with citizens.
This is particularly true in Jammu and Kashmir, where unemployment remains markedly higher than the national average, and where, according to official data and recent Mission YUVA baseline surveys, over 3.7 lakh educated young people are registered as job-seekers on the J&K Employment Portal. For this generation, government recruitment is not an abstraction but the most plausible route to social mobility. The fairness of that process, therefore, carries weight far beyond administrative routine.
Periodically, questions arise in public discourse about appointments, promotions and the transparency of recruitment processes in the Union Territory. Such episodes, whatever their eventual resolution, return public attention to a basic question: are the institutions responsible for recruitment doing enough to assure citizens that merit and accountability remain the operating principles of public service, rather than the exception to be defended after the fact.
Each year, thousands of young aspirants prepare for examinations conducted by the Jammu and Kashmir Services Selection Board (JKSSB) and the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission (JKPSC). Families invest savings, and in many cases sell land or orchards, to sustain years of coaching and preparation. This is not a marginal social fact; it is the basis on which an entire generation’s faith in the state is built. That faith is what makes incidents of alleged malpractice so consequential — not merely as administrative lapses, but as ruptures in a wider social contract.
The most recent such episode came in August 2025, when allegations of a paper leak in the JKSSB Junior Engineer (Electrical) examination — accompanied by videos purporting to show mass copying, and claims that question papers had circulated on Telegram and WhatsApp — led to the examination’s cancellation amid public outrage. It was not the first such controversy, and the pattern of recurrence is itself the more troubling signal: it suggests that existing safeguards, however well-intentioned, have not kept pace with the methods by which examination security can be compromised.
A question larger than any single department
The concern here is not confined to one agency or one individual lapse. It concerns the broader principle that recruitment to public service must be seen, and not merely asserted, to be fair. Citizens are entitled to expect that selections proceed according to established rules and transparent procedure, and that opportunity is genuinely open to all eligible candidates rather than contingent on access or influence.
Transparency in this context is not an administrative courtesy; it is closer to a precondition for institutional legitimacy. When questions are raised about a selection process, the appropriate institutional response is documentation and openness, not silence or an inquiry that drags on without a clear timeline. A transparent process, it is worth noting, also protects the many officers who have earned their positions through competitive examination and years of service — their credibility, too, is diminished when the system as a whole is viewed with suspicion.
What aspirants and their families say
Conversations with aspirants and their families in different parts of the Union Territory point to a shared anxiety beneath the specific grievances. Hashim, whose family in Budgam depends on apple cultivation, described selling part of the family orchard to fund his younger brother’s coaching in Srinagar for the JKSSB examinations. “Every time there is news of a paper leak or a cancelled exam, the family feels it has been let down,” he said. “We are not asking for favours, only a level field where the effort is rewarded.”
Kuldeep, a retired government employee in Srinagar with more than three decades of service, offered a longer view, noting that the abolition of interviews for posts up to Pay Level 6 and the shift to computer-based testing were genuine steps forward. But, he added, a single leak or perceived irregularity can undo years of work in building credibility, particularly with a generation of aspirants that is more connected and less willing to accept opacity than before.
For Rohi Jan, a young aspirant from Ganderbal preparing for teaching and administrative posts, the stakes have a gendered dimension. Repeated delays or controversies around recruitment, she said, make families in rural areas more reluctant to invest in a daughter’s coaching and education, since the promised return — a fair shot at a government post — feels less assured each time a process is questioned.
Reforms under way, gaps that remain
The administration’s record on this front is not without substance. Over the past two years, more than 11,500 selections have reportedly been made through JKSSB and JKPSC, and the government has set a target of filling 7,253 vacant posts — 1,502 gazetted and 5,751 non-gazetted — by the end of 2025. Structural changes have accompanied this push: the abolition of interviews for a large category of posts up to Pay Level 6, revised JKSSB regulations favouring online computer-based testing and a single examination for multiple posts, an expanded JKSSB mandate, and a Single Window System intended to standardise the framing of recruitment rules. New rules for several services, including police gazetted and secretariat subordinate cadres, have been notified with an explicit emphasis on merit.
These are not insignificant measures. But the recurrence of leak allegations suggests that procedural reform on paper has not yet been matched by preventive capacity on the ground. Stronger real-time surveillance during examinations, wider use of proctoring technology where feasible, prompt publication of question papers and model answer keys, and independent inquiries bound by strict timelines would each address a specific point of vulnerability. So too would more proactive disclosure — publishing merit lists, cut-off marks and selection criteria as a matter of course, rather than only in response to Right to Information requests.
The stakes of getting this right
None of this is a call for indulgence toward any particular grievance; it is an argument for the ordinary discipline of accountable administration. A system that rewards merit sustains the confidence of its most capable aspirants. A system perceived to reward proximity or influence does the opposite, and risks pushing talented young people toward disillusionment or migration in search of fairer opportunity elsewhere.
As Jammu and Kashmir continues on a trajectory marked by improved security, a recovering tourism economy and renewed attention to grassroots governance, the credibility of its recruitment institutions deserves to be treated as a comparable priority to infrastructure and investment — not a separate or secondary concern, but one of the conditions on which the legitimacy of the rest depends. Economic growth can build roads and bridges. Only institutional trust can make citizens believe those roads and bridges were built, and those who built them were hired, on merit.
