In our view, the government recruitment initiative under the Saksham Skills & Employment programme of the Government of Haryana witnessed a shift from being ‘Shooting Star’ with high ‘political salience’ and low ‘system capacity’ to ‘Battle Ready’ with high ‘political salience’ and high ‘system capacity’.

The government recruitment initiative aimed to streamline the recruitment of Group D employees in government departments of Haryana to enhance efficiency and transparency.

On the political salience front, ensuring the integrity and fairness of the government recruitment process was a high political priority for the Chief Minister from the beginning. The CM’s messaging, throughout, maintained that the government would ensure recruitment is carried out in a “Bina Kharchi, Bina Parchi” manner, reflecting the high political salience on the subject.

System capacity – that is, people, process and infrastructure– was built within a year owing to high political salience. On the people front, the Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) was restructured with a new post for the Controller of Exams being sanctioned who was responsible for logistics, scheduling, centre management and security for examinations. The legal cell was also strengthened to ensure the process doesn’t get marred by lawsuits. On the process front, a new policy was passed in the Haryana legislative assembly that introduced uniform service rules for all Group D posts and scraped interviews in Group C & Group D. Aside from that, daily scrum meetings were organised to keep every stakeholder on the same page and tightly manage every single thread of the exercise. Additionally, document verification was made mandatory only for selected candidates. This collectively allowed the government to reduce the time taken to complete the recruitment exercise. On the infrastructure front, technological infrastructure was built to move HSSC’s processes online from physical formats which included scrutiny of candidates’ documents, managing requisition requests from various departments and tracking progress on all court cases related to HSSC.

With this, the state of Haryana was able to cater to 18 Lakh applicants for Group D jobs in 2018 and fill over 45,000 positions in 18 months, as opposed to the 75,000 positions filled by the state in 18 years.