By Jehangir Ali
Srinagar: Less than seven months after Article 370 was read down by the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)-led Union government, unknown officials in the Jammu and Kashmir administration allegedly hired a recruitment firm – illegally – and later fabricated the list of candidates who were selected for hundreds of government posts, an official probe has found.
The probe by J&K’s premier Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has once again punched holes in the saffron party’s claims that J&K was freed of corruption after it was bifurcated and downgraded into a Union territory in 2019 and brought under the direct administration of the Union home ministry.
After the erstwhile state was stripped of its special status by the Union government, the Central Bureau of Investigation and ACB among other probe agencies have pointed to irregularities in recruitment drives and schemes which were rolled out by J&K administration.
In its latest probe into the recruitment of 690 fireman and fireman drivers in J&K, the ACB has found that the officials allegedly adopted illegal measures to hire a Jammu-based private firm owned by one Maharaj Krishan Wali which was awarded the contract for conducting a written test for the posts in 2020.
The preliminary probe by the ACB has revealed that the official record of the selection process and the final selection list were allegedly fabricated by unknown officials from the Fire and Emergency Services Department to “confer undue benefits upon themselves and the beneficiaries”.
The alleged scam was initially probed by J&K’s General Administration Department which submitted its findings to the ACB on July 24 this year.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
