Jammu & Kashmir: 250 non migrant Pandits getting state government jobs

Kashmir Wire

Srinagar

In a bid to incentivise the Pandits who stayed back and did not migrate, the government has decided to recruit 250 Pandit youth this year. The process for the identification of the posts has already started, highly informed sources said.

“Under the Prime Minister Development Programme (PMDP), there was a small section under which the programme funding recruitment of 3000 migrant Kashmiri Pandits,” informed sources said. “Almost 250 of these positions will be filled from the unemployed Pandits who have not migrated and are living in Kashmir.”

The Pandits living in Kashmir have been campaigning for all these years that while they stayed back, it has proved to be dis-incentive to them. To avail any benefit that is for Kashmiri Pundits, migration is the key basic. Their campaign eventually led to the setting aside of 250 positions, sources said, adding the Home Ministry is on board on this important development.

Pandit colony in Qazigund

Given the representation of the Kashmiri Pandits falling in the state government services, the Government of India launched special recruitments drives aimed at managing the unemployment in the Pandit community, mostly migrants. Earlier, under a special drive recruitment to 3000 positions were funded by the central government of which more than 2600 were eventually recruited.

Later, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his ambitious Rs 80,000 crore PMDP in Srinagar, days ahead of Mufti Sayeed’s demise; it also has an element of 3000 additional positions for the Kashmiri Pandits. Of this slot, 250 are now going to the Pandits who had not migrated from Kashmir.

Meanwhile, the Home Secretary is slated to preside over another PMDP review meeting in Delhi on November 30. This is a quick second review as the last meeting on PMDP was presided over by him on October 26.

“There is nothing much that has changed in the PMDP in five weeks,” one senior officer said. “But the Home Secretary may have certain things in mind.”

The only major shift that the PMDP related activities witnessed was the transfer of Power Secretary, Dheeraj Gupta. He was sent on central government’s deputation and was replaced by Hardesh Kumar, with Housing department as an additional charge. Most of the money under the PMDP is for the power sector in which there has not been any major shift on the spending front.

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