The unbridled corruption over the ongoing recruitment in government departments burst into the open in Goa over the weekend with Panaji MLA Atanasio “Babush” Monserrate taking on his party colleague and PWD Minister Deepak Prabhu Pauskar over the “sale of jobs to the highest bidder”.
On Sunday Monserrate took things a step further and went on to narrate an incident where he claimed another ‘senior’ minister in the Cabinet too complained about the PWD Minister and narrated how the PWD minister asked this ‘senior’ minister to ask ‘his’ candidates to keep the answer paper blank with the understanding that the answers would be filled in later and the candidates would be given an advantage. Not surprisingly the PWD Minister responded with a complete denial claiming that he has no role to play in the recruitment process and cannot interfere in what he said was an independent process. The only thing surprising about his denial was that he was able to say it with a straight face.
While Babush claims the entire process is rigged and that the real bright candidates were deliberately kept out of the top of the lists and that he is fighting on their behalf -- he betrayed his real intentions when he said that the minister should have told him that the jobs were on sale and then he would have taken care of ‘his’ candidates. The only truth that emerges from the ongoing saga is that propriety has gone out of the window. Things have reached such a degree of shamelessness that ministers no longer even need to pretend that the process is independent and fair and ensure that the best candidate is selected for the post.
Had Pauskar fairly ‘distributed’ the posts in the PWD department among a wider set of MLAs instead of keeping them mostly to himself, this issue would not come out in the open as it did. Pauskar’s mistake -- in the minds of those in power -- was not that he is selling the posts to the highest bidder -- but that he is keeping all the money for himself and candidates recommended by his party colleagues are being given the short shrift -- leaving his colleagues to face the angry candidates and their families unable to explain why things turned out the way they did. This is indicative of a situation where ministers have come to believe that their voters have taken corruption for granted and expect that there will be corruption in recruitment even as they continue to maintain a straight face that they are a government with ‘zero tolerance for corruption.’
It is up to the voters now, to demand that there be probity in public life and not give in to the “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” that majority of the ministers in this present dispensation seems to have internalised. It is time we put the common good over narrow personal gain as, expectedly, the government servants of the future will be only beholden to the MLAs that helped them get the job and not to the general public that they are paid to serve.
