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KARACHI, Aug 1: Hundreds of applicants for 3,370 vacant police constable posts undertook written tests at the city’s five police headquarters amid reports that the exercise may be suspended for the fifth time because of differences between the coalition partners of the ruling alliance.
Well-placed sources in the police department told Dawn that the on-going process of recruitment could face abrupt suspension due to simmering differences over would-be recruits selected on the basis of merit and a list of so-called ‘political appointments.’
However, the officer inducting the recruits under the command of the city police chief Azhar Farooqui, DIG Administration Khurram Gulzar, denied such rumours of potential suspension. “Right now, I am not aware of any such orders about suspending or cancelling the entire process of recruitment,” he told Dawn. “We have carried out the exercise on merit, to the best of our ability, and today [Wednesday], we conducted written tests of candidates who passed the physical examinations earlier.”
Reiterating that the appointments will be on merit since the constables would remain in the system for the next 30 years, DIG Gulzar said that the test results will be announced on August 4.
The final interviews of the successful candidates will be conducted on August 6 by a team headed by an SP with two DSPs at each of the five police headquarters: Garden HQ, Khwaja Ajmer Nagri HQ, Malir HQ, Naval NQ (West) and East HQ (next to the Aziz Bhatti police station). It had earlier been planned that a centralised board would be set up to interview successful candidates but Mr Gulzar said that this proposal had been dropped.
During the current process, applications were invited for recruitment in the Sindh Police against 3,370 vacancies available across the process. There are 1,475 vacancies in Karachi, of which 849 were initially reserved for men and 626 for women. However, since the department received too few applications from female candidates, the separate seats were merged, said Mr Gulzar.
The exercise to appoint constables has, in the past, been set aside four times. Sources told Dawn that the point of contention was a ‘quota’ for new recruits: ruling political parties wanted their own men appointed in maximum numbers since this would benefit them in the long run.
These sudden cancellations badly affected candidates who had already given physical and written tests. On the condition of anonymity, a police officer said that many poor candidates who held graduate degrees spent time and money taking the tests but were informed at the end that the process stood cancelled. “They had applied in the hope of being appointed without knowing that the recruits had already been decided upon,” said the officer.
In 2002, the police department selected 9,000 constables out of 200,000 applicants from across the province. A centralised committee, headed by the then DIG Training Yaseen Khan, completed the process on merit which remained free of controversy since the procedure was transparent and all political pressures were set aside. Now, however, political groups who are currently at the helm of affairs want to compensate for the damage they suffered during the last recruitment drive, claimed Dawn’s sources.
According to a senior police officer, under the old system, the SSPs of all five police zones were empowered to appoint constables against vacant posts, as and when required. He maintained that the advantage of that system lay in the fact that appointments were made in small numbers and pressure could not mount. He suggested that if town SPs were given the power to appoint constables, vacancies could be filled on time.
