CM Pinarayi warns agitating job aspirants of the designs of opposition parties

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Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that job aspirants agitating against the government should be wary of people who were trying to exploit their concerns and disappointments.
The chief minister was referring to the opposition parties, mainly the Congress and the BJP, who had thrown their weight behind the Secretariat protest launched by the Rank Holders' Association. He also brushed aside the 'job for money' scandal surrounding the solar scandal victim Saritha Nair saying no one could put up government jobs for sale. "There could be fraudsters trying to cheat the gullible but government jobs under the LDF will not be on sale," Vijayan said.
During his customary sunset briefing in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday, the chief minister said the agitating job aspirants were somehow deluded into believing that all who had found their names in the rank list would get a job. “Only one-fifth of those who have got into the rank list would eventually get a job,” the chief minister said.
Throwing a statistical light on the point, he said there were 5, 28,231 (five lakh twenty eight thousand two hundred and thirty one) government employees in Kerala. “At the most, the government can recruit 25,000 people a year," he said.
But according to him, the LDF government could appoint more than what it could in the last five years. He said 1,57,911 candidates were appointed through the PSC in the last five years, which on an average is more than 31,000 appointments a year.
The chief minister also refuted the charge that the uptake from the last grade rank lists were suspiciously poor under the LDF. It was alleged that most of these last grade jobs went to CPM sympathisers. The chief minister said there was a reason why a lesser number of candidates were being picked up from last grade rank lists than it was the case earlier.

“Now, degree holders cannot write the last grade exam. Earlier, they could and most would find their names in other lists too. So when those higher in the rank list go after more attractive jobs, candidates lower down the rank list will get picked because of the NJD (non-joining duty) vacancies that were created as a result," he said.
With more qualified aspirants disallowed from taking last grade tests, not many NJD vacancies are created.
The chief minister also sought to put the record straight on the growing resentment surrounding what the opposition calls 'backdoor appointments'. He said that none of the employees who had been made permanent under the LDF tenure belonged to job categories to which recruitments were done by the Public Service Commission.
“No job aspirant who had found a place in the rank list would be affected by the government's move to regularise temporary employees who had been in government service for more than 10 years. In the case of some, even 20 years,” Vijayan said.
He said the regularisation was based solely on humanitarian considerations. “These people had been working for years in government service without enjoying any benefits,” the chief minister said. He added that most of these people who had been regularised had been appointed during the UDF tenure.
He said that his government had done better than the previous UDF dispensation in PSC appointments. Under the LDF government, he said 4,012 rank lists had been published. It was only 3,113 during the UDF tenure.
Vijayan also said that the government had taken strong measures to ensure that vacancies get promptly reported to the PSC.