Jammu and Kashmir's Job Crisis: Outsourcing and Unemployment

Jammu and Kashmir, India Jul 20, 2026 ALN: 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 . 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 enough. The youth of Jammu and Kashmir have been squeezed by what amounts to a double whammy; and reservation policy was the first blow. Since the 2019 abrogation of Article 370, the reservation matrix here has climbed to nearly 70 percent of seats in government jobs and professional admissions, leaving Open Merit candidates to compete for roughly 30 percent. The squeeze got sharp enough that even legislators from the ruling National Conference joined street protests demanding it be rationalised. A Cabinet proposal to claw back about ten percentage points for Open Merit has been stuck in the Raj Bhawan-to-Home-Ministry pipeline since December 2024, still unresolved 19 months on.

Then came the second blow. A government’s job is to guarantee rights, not ration them among its own. It certifies merit; it doesn’t manufacture patronage. And it has no business stealing opportunity from the people who earned it to quietly hand it to the people who didn’t. In Jammu and Kashmir right now, public employment runs on jiski lathi uski bhains; whoever holds the stick owns the buffalo. Simply, might is right. That isn’t governance. It’s capture, plain and simple.

Kashmir’s youth have watched this story before, only the cast changes. During the PDP-BJP coalition, the state’s own Governor, the late Satya Pal Malik, publicly disclosed that the selection list for recruitment in the Jammu and Kashmir Bank had been altered. More than 500 candidates who had already cleared the process on merit were quietly replaced by the relatives and political workers of those in power. Years later, when the present National Conference government was pressed to answer for the current outsourcing row, its own ministers pointed right back at the PDP’s record on J&K Bank recruitment and on the Khadi and Village Industries Board, both of which have since drawn scrutiny from the Anti-Corruption Bureau. Nearly every party that has governed this Union Territory has, at some point, been accused by the very institutions meant to check it of doing exactly what it now condemns in its rivals.

The paper-leak years came next. In 2022, JKSSB’s offline exams for the J&K Police Sub-Inspector post, the Finance Accounts Assistant post, and the Junior Engineer post were compromised through leaked papers and swapped OMR sheets. The company running them, Meritrac Pvt Ltd, was already blacklisted elsewhere for similar failures. More than 3,500 selections that honest young people had earned through their own labour were wiped out in one stroke. CBI teams raided more than seventy locations, arrested serving security personnel among others, and recovered lakhs of rupees in cash. Aspirants alleged they’d been asked to pay between twenty and thirty lakh rupees for the leaked paper. Once aspirants forced the scam into the open and the exams were cancelled, JKSSB handed the re-exam not to a clean agency but to Aptech Limited, another company already blacklisted in eight states, including a three-year ban in Uttar Pradesh. The Jammu and Kashmir High Court’s Single Bench found the Aptech tender had been altered; the court’s own word was “mala fide” and declared the company ineligible to conduct the exam. The government appealed to the Division Bench and got that very order stayed. A company the court had just found unfit was allowed to carry on regardless: two blacklisted contractors in a row and a government that fought in court to keep the second one in the race.

Now put today’s chapter next to those. The National Conference went into the 2024 election promising one lakh government jobs. Instead, at least a quarter of that number has been converted into outsourced, private-agency postings, jobs its own ministers admit carry no pension, no promotion, and none of the protections that made a government job worth a five-year wait in the first place. A promise of permanence has quietly become a promise of precarity. Nobody was asked to vote for that.

Whichever party is in charge in Srinagar, the pattern keeps repeating for a structural reason. Regular recruitment in Jammu and Kashmir is supposed to run through the Public Service Commission and the Services Selection Board, bodies built, however imperfectly, on reservation rosters, published merit lists, and public accountability. Outsourcing routes around all of it. A private agency doesn’t answer to the reservation policy that protects backward regions and categories, doesn’t have to publish a merit list that can be challenged, doesn’t have to survive an RTI query the way a constitutional recruitment body does. Every job that goes through an outsourcing agency instead of the JKPSC or JKSSB has slipped past every safeguard this region fought to build.

This is exactly why transparency can’t stay optional. The complete list of every empanelled outsourcing agency, the criteria used to select them, and the roster of every candidate placed through them should be public information, available to any citizen who files an RTI application, not dragged out reluctantly after a political slugfest in the Assembly. A government with nothing to hide shouldn’t object to opening this record on its own instead of being shamed into it one press conference at a time.

The human cost here isn’t hypothetical or anecdotal. A study comparing employed and unemployed youth across the Kashmir Valley found the unemployed group scoring roughly twice as high on measures of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress as their employed peers. Every scam, every unexplained outsourcing list, every deflection from a government spokesperson adds another layer to that toll. A generation isn’t losing hope because it lacks ability. It’s losing hope because it keeps discovering that ability was never really the criterion being tested.

The youth of Jammu and Kashmir aren’t asking for charity. They’re asking for what every citizen is owed: a fair, transparent, and accountable process where a certificate and years of hard work count for more than a connection. PDP, the BJP-backed administrations before it, and now the National Conference have each, in their turn, stood accused of treating public employment as private property. Breaking that cycle will take more than a press conference. It will take an independent, time-bound probe into the outsourcing of these 25,000 posts, full public disclosure of every agency and appointee involved, and a firm, enforceable commitment that every future government job in this Union Territory is filled on merit, not on who is holding the stick.

Sahil Parray, Student Activist, Head Open Merit Students Association