Fraud in seniority list in employment office alleged

[karira]

Forty-year-old R. Kathirvel has been hoping to get a teaching job in a government school ever since he completed a diploma in teacher education in 2004. This year Mr. Kathirvel’s wait is likely to get over, but may not be that easy. He will lose out to candidates like him, who, having registered in various district employment offices in the state, have “migrated” to Erode to push him down the seniority list.

“Until recently, I was the third most senior candidate in the waiting list but have been pushed down by 40 people, who have migrated from other districts,” he laments. Most of the migrants are from Tutucorin, Tirunelveli, Nagercoil, Dharmapuri and Coimbatore districts.

These migrant candidates, who move from one district to another, get to retain their seniority in the waiting list as per a Government Order, which says, “the registrants who seek re-registration from one district to another district should get a certificate about his residence in the new district from the tahsildar concerned and get his registration in the new district with his seniority in the old district”.

For candidates like Mr. Kathirvel the problem starts here. Migrant candidates, using touts, get bogus residence proofs in the migrating district, he alleges.

The State Government too has acknowledged the problem in a government order in July 2002. It says, “complaints have been received that some registrants are furnishing bogus residential certificates to transfer their registration to district where there are considerable number of vacancies”. The order further says: “Because of such re-registration, the seniority of the native registrants are (is) affected and such affected native registrants are complaining.”

Mr. Kathirvel’s friend and fellow victim R. Shanmugavelan says such a manipulation of the seniority list has been happening since 1997 in Erode.
This year, if it happens, the 300 candidates in the waiting list, all of whom have registered on April 5, 2004, will get affected. The information the candidates have obtained using the Right to Information Act says so far this year more than 40 candidates have migrated.

Asked about the candidates’ complaint, Collector T. Udhayachandran says prima facie it appears that at least 50 per cent of the re-registrants are bogus. He has ordered a thorough inquiry into the incident to ascertain the veracity of each and every re-registrant to initiate action.

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