Reforming recruitment

It has been months since the Supreme Court took up the enforcement of the rights of disabled persons in the country. The issue in front of the SC was simple enough: the enforcement of the three percent disabled job quota in government jobs. There is little doubt that the quota has not been fulfilled. When the SC has asked various government functionaries what they are doing about this, the response has been far from satisfactory. The court has not only told them to do better, it has also declared it is not satisfied with the current set of legislation around the rights of disabled persons. Provincial governments have either ignored the matter or come up with solutions that are non-starters. For example, the Punjab government has proposed creating an online registry for disabled persons. Not only would such a registry seem to be discriminatory, the simple idea that all disabled persons in the province would register themselves online seems to be a far stretch. Such a method will create more problems without solving the real issue: how to fulfill the disabled quota in government jobs?

The SC has made it clear that the government only makes a half-hearted effort at advertising the disabled job quota via newspapers. It would instead need to do better by making a more active effort to recruit disabled persons to jobs in government. In the latest hearing, the federal and provincial representatives presented reports on what each province was planning to do. The SC rejected the reports and asked the federal and provincial secretaries to appear in person with a detailed action plan and timeframe to implement the three percent job quota.

The Sindh government has presented a complex system of forming three separate committees – one to redress grievances, one for district recruitment, and special medical boards at district hospitals as well as promising to issue notifications on disabled recruitment in different departments within 15 days. It is also planning to use free airtime on radio and TV to advertise the positions. This might be a start, but a decision to add more layers of bureaucracy is rarely promising. What is needed instead is the will to integrate disabled persons into the very fabric of how government operates, instead of ticking some check marks. This case should ideally push for a larger examination of recruitment in the bureaucracy and the place of disabled persons within it.