New Delhi: Union Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) Minister Jitendra Singh has appealed the Chief Ministers of all the states to take steps to abolish interview for recruitment to lower posts wherever possible.
Jitendra Singh has written to the Chief Ministers requesting them to lead this initiative in their respective States.
As a prompt follow up to the suggestion made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his Independence Day address to abolish interview for recruitment to such posts where it is not required, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) took up the matter with the State Governments on September 4 following which the matter was discussed with the Secretaries of General Administration Department (GAD)/Personnel from States during the two-day workshop held in New Delhi on September 8-9.
The government’s view is that the interviews should be discontinued for recruitment to junior level posts where personality or skill assessment is not absolutely required. The objective behind abolition of interviews for such posts is that it will curb corruption, ensure more objective selection in a transparent manner and substantially ease the problems of the poor and resourceless aspirants. This will not only enable giving more weightage to the merit but also supplement the government’s resolve for “Maximum Governance, Minimum Government”.
In the letter addressed to the Chief Ministers, Singh has informed that several Group ‘B’ (Non-Gazetted) and Group ‘C’ (Non-Technical) posts in various Ministries/Departments and other organisations under Central Government have already been identified where the selections can be made through a competitive examination without conducting the interview.
The Chief Ministers have been requested to involve the Public Service Commission and other recruiting agencies in their respective States where interview can be discontinued and selection can be done only through examination. This would be a major step towards achieving the goal of citizen-centric transparent governance.
The DoPT and the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances (DAR&PG) and the Department of Pensions and Pensioners Welfare have recently undertaken several path breaking decisions including abolition of attestation of certificates and instead introduced self-attestation of certificates, introduction of pension portal to abolish the requirement for a written life-certificate and decision to revisit and revise the pattern and syllabus of Civil Services Examination.
