The promise of a government job is, for lakhs of young people in Jammu and Kashmir, more than a paycheck. It is a contract of fairness: study hard, compete honestly, and the state will reward merit over connection. The BJP’s allegation that the National Conference-led government has outsourced 25,000 jobs to contractors strikes directly at that contract, and the charge deserves a serious public reckoning rather than a partisan shouting match.
Two questions matter here, and they are separable. The first is procedural: should government employment be routed through contractors at all, or must it flow through a transparent body like the SSRB with open advertisement, written examination and a published merit list? On this point the critics have a defensible case. Outsourcing, wherever it is used, tends to dilute accountability. Contracts can be opaque, selection criteria fuzzy, and the trail of who got hired and why difficult to audit. A government that came to power promising one lakh jobs owes its electorate clarity on how it intends to deliver them.
The second question is factual: has money changed hands, and have appointments been steered toward the favoured few? These are grave accusations of corruption and nepotism, and like all such charges they require proof, not merely rhetoric. The demand for an independent enquiry is therefore reasonable. If the government has nothing to hide, scrutiny vindicates it; if irregularities exist, the public has a right to know. Naming and shaming without evidence, however, serves no one and risks reducing a legitimate governance concern to electoral theatre.
What the youth of the region need is less heat and more daylight. The government should publicly explain the rationale for outsourcing, disclose the terms of every contract, and clarify how these arrangements square with its manifesto commitment to regular recruitment. If the policy cannot withstand that sunlight, it should be revisited. Equally, the opposition should let any inquiry follow the facts wherever they lead, rather than presuming the verdict in advance.
Unemployment in Jammu and Kashmir is not an abstraction; it is the quiet despair of a generation that did everything asked of it and still waits. Every backdoor, real or perceived, deepens the cynicism that honest effort no longer pays. Whichever party governs, the test is the same: are jobs being filled by merit, in the open, or by patronage, in the shadows? On that question, the young are watching.
