An audio clip of an Information Technology Department officer demanding a Rs 1 lakh bribe from a job aspirant went viral, a couple of days after the State government was basking in transparency it brought about in recruitments after onboarding the Goa Staff Selection Commission. GSSC, no doubt brought a whole lot of confidence into the system which till now was largely known for biases, political influences and to a great extent corruption or extortion.
Hardly had the euphoria of GSSC died down, the audio clip of over six minutes uncovered the officer literally demanding an advance to reserve the job of a Senior Associate (Social Media) in the Infotech Corporation of Goa. The job in question is a contractual one and does not come under the purview of the GSSC. There are thousands of such vacancies that are being created or filled from time to time leaving a gaping hole in the transparency facade that is being put up.
If not for the audio recording that went viral, this issue could have gone unnoticed along with the shady business side of such recruitment. The officer is heard explaining that there are hundreds of aspirants in the queue ready to pay that money and that he has given this person a preference because of a reference by “someone”.
It is obvious that this is not the first candidate that this officer has extorted money from in a promise for a job going by his claim of complete control over the hiring process. Going by the conversation, it appears that there are others along this brazenly corrupt pathway working ‘hand in glove’. This offers a tiny peek into what the system looks like from the inside.
The contrast is glaring. On one side there is transparency in the name of GSSC, and on the other, there is corruption by top officers. The only difference is the type of vacancies each handles. Suffice it to say that such corruption leaves an indelible blemish on recruitment, a blemish that will need a giant will and an unflinching intent to wipe off. Unemployment has been Goa’s biggest dilemma for a very long time.
The problem at hand is to find a fix. A bigger issue with such recruitment is that rogue officers become architects of an incompetent workforce when there is a massive pool of trained and meritorious Human Resources. A person hired through the backdoor is not only going to be a liability in the long run but will also vitiate the entire work environment.
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has time and again spoken tough against corruption in recruitment and asked people to report it while assuring action. But what happens when guilty officers go scot-free over a period of time? Or when corrupt officers are rehabilitated. Such re-entry mocks the vows of zero-tolerance towards corruption. The officer in question has a chequered past, having been probed for an earlier unrelated forgery of documents offence. He was found guilty and suspended then.
It is high time the government makes a conscious attempt to plug all these grey areas of the job space. The processes must be decentralised and transparent, and above all those found guilty of extortion and corruption must be dealt with ruthlessly. For sure, it would require a herculean effort to uproot the tentacles of corruption that have spread deep into the system.
