KARACHI: More than a month after the Sindh High Court stayed the process of recruitment of 21,000 candidates in BPS-1 to 15, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) on Thursday came out with the claim that the private firm, Siba Testing Services, which conducted the tests of applicants, was actually owned and run by Sindh government officers.

MQM-P’s parliamentary party leader in the Sindh Assembly Kunwar Naveed Jamil told a press conference at the Karachi Press Club that the private testing firm minted billions of rupees by collecting an Rs1,750 fee from each applicant only for processing their documents at the very initial stage.

This huge amount of money remained unaccounted for despite the fact the firm was hired by the provincial government and paid for its services.

He along with other party colleagues said that the officers who owned and ran the firm with the protection of authorities unfairly declared “fail” the candidates from certain family backgrounds.

“These senior [Sindh government] officers have got this Siba Testing Service registered through the SECP [Securities & Exchange Commission of Pakistan],” said Mr Jamil. “This makes it more suspicious when you come to know that this private firm has an office at the IBA [Institute of Business Administration] Sukkur. “How is it possible?” he asked.

“Secondly, it’s an open secret that this company is owned by senior Sindh government officers and has been tasked with recruiting applicants of certain background and rejecting others.”

He said that it was MQM-P that obtained a stay from the SHC in January this year to get the recruitment process suspended.

A two-judge bench headed by Justice Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi had also suspended two notifications issued by the provincial authorities in January and February 2020 to notify decisions of the provincial cabinet and issuing directives to fill over 21,300 post in more than 30 departments.

Now the federal government should take notice of this scam being run through the private firm, which was not only depriving deserving and competent applicants from employment, but also extorting a huge amount of money in the name of processing fee.

“When hundreds of thousands of applicants apply for certain number of jobs, you can well imagine how much amount, which is non-refundable, the firm earns. It’s sheer exploitation and it should come to a halt. The Sindh government itself is involved in this racket so we demand from the federal government to play its role and come to the rescue of hundreds of thousands of competent youths of the province,” said Mr Jamil.

Published in Dawn, February 18th, 2022