Jammu and Kashmir is talking about jobs again, not the jobs that were created, but the ones that quietly disappeared into the hands of private companies. Over the past two years, the Omar Abdullah-led government has outsourced more than 25,000 positions across nearly 29 departments, routed through over 200 private agencies based in J&K, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. The Health and Medical Education Department and the Floriculture Department account for the largest share. No public advertisement. No open notification. When the opposition finally raised the matter on the floor of the Assembly, nobody in government could give a straight answer to the one question every citizen is entitled to ask; how were these agencies chosen, and how did they choose their candidates?

Nobody has explained why. A government that cannot say how 25,000 jobs were handed out isn’t protecting an administrative process, it’s protecting itself from having to justify one. A young person who has spent five years preparing for the JKPSC or the JKSSB gets a simple message out of all this: preparation, merit, the right to a fair shot, none of it counts for as much as a phone call to the right office. Hard work has become optional. Since when did that become an acceptable message for a government to send its own youth?

This isn’t an abstract argument for the youth of this Union Territory. More than 3.7 lakh educated young people are registered as unemployed with the government’s own Directorate of Employment. Urban youth unemployment here has run as high as 32 percent, and one Periodic Labour Force Survey release put that among the highest of any state or Union Territory in the country, alongside the country’s highest recorded joblessness among young women. Nearly 77,000 sanctioned government posts sit vacant across departments even as outsourcing agencies quietly fill the space those posts were meant to occupy. Families borrow money for coaching. Young men and women give up years of their twenties preparing for a single exam, and then watch the government hand out through the backdoor exactly what it never had the will to advertise up front.

There’s a second front nobody talks about........

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