By Nantoo Banerjee
Poor Chautala and company! Lodged inside Delhi’s Tihar Jail upon conviction by a special CBI court in over Rs.100-crore corruption and bribery in the junior basic trained (JBT) teacher recruitment case in Haryana, former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, his son Ajoy and 51 others, including two IAS officers, must be cursing the Prime Minister for setting the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) under his charge at them to investigate into the allegations and chargesheet them for an offence which is commonly practiced by ruling political parties and their official henchmen by governments at states and the centre for years. CBI judge Vinod Kumar, who was concerned only with this particular case, may be absolutely right to convict the high-profile gang involved in recruitment of 3,200-odd junior teachers through a well-oiled illegal job-selling process, but few will disagree that the practice exists across the country and across governments.
In fact, corruption and bribery in recruitment don’t rest only with government job, they are rampant even in large private sector companies using so-called professional head-hunting or placement firms to employ people at all levels – from unskilled and skilled workers, security servicemen, management trainees to senior management positions, including corporate directors. The annual mass recruitment of management trainees and probationers in Shaw Wallace under the late M R Chhabria with the help of a Kolkata-based national placement agency and nearly mass exit of those recruits failing to qualify the grade at the end of their respective terms reached a scandalous proportion in the heady days of the giant liquor-to-FMCG company in the 1980s and ‘90s. The job racket, which is common in many companies across the country, is run by those rogue corporate management and their HR heads in connivance with placement agencies. These agencies share agreed portions of their fee income from successful job placement with those unscrupulous corporate management staff.
However, nothing can beat the government machinery in the practice of job racket, including appointment, promotion, transfer, placement and the award of contract. For a long time, Indian Railways, the country’s largest departmental business undertaking with some 1.4 million employees on its roll, has been at the centre of opposition criticism for political hiring of personnel — directly or indirectly through railway supply and service contractors — under the patronage of its minister-in-charge. It existed even before the era of A B A Ghani Khan Chowdhury. The practice continued. Not all jobs came free to so-called party workers and followers of the minister-in-charge in his or her state. Agents, mostly informal political party ‘appointees’, collected from recruits Rs. 3-5 lakh per job. The amount so collected was believed to be meant for bolstering the minister’s party coffer.
Historically, the single largest public sector job racket, involving politicians, private agents and corporate management, was linked with Bokaro Steel Limited (BSL), now a SAIL plant, in the early 1970s when nearly 15,000 people were recruited by the company in various trades in a span of only a few months. Most of them had reportedly obtained fake certificates of age, academic qualification and technical expertise in required trades from private employment service agents based at a small town called Marafari, located on the way to Bokaro from Dhanbad. Local people made a fun of it calling the place Marafari ‘university’. Years later, it was ‘revealed’ that in some cases employees at the Bokaro steel plant had retired from service in the normal course while their ‘underaged’ fathers still working in the plant. (IPA Service)