THATTA, Nov 26: About 2,550 youths who have applied for an undisclosed number of vacant seats for police constables in Thatta district fear they will not be able to land the jobs because the district police already employs about 450 constables who are serving in other districts of the province but draw salary from Thatta for many years.

The district police have invited applications for the posts of constables and said the recruitment process will begin on Nov 28. The 450 constables, called ‘lien’ in official jargon, were serving in Sindh Reserve Police, Badin, Shaheed Benazirabad, Jamshoro, Sanghar and other districts, they claimed.

Some applicants who wished not to be named said that with such a large number of constables drawing salaries from the district how the department would accommodate new recruits and pay them salaries out of the limited sanctioned budget.

PPP MPA Sadiq Ali Memon and the party’s district president Arbab Wazir Memon said that they had requested Sindh Home Minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza to withdraw the constables serving in other districts so as to accommodate maximum number of new recruits possessing Thatta domicile.

The PPP leaders said that they would take up the issue again with the minister during his scheduled public meeting on Dec 2 in Mirpur Bathoro.

Thatta DPO Fareed Jan Sarhandi said that he had already requested the RPO of Hyderabad to withdraw these constables and shift their names to their respective districts so that recruitment of new cops in Thatta could be streamlined before resumption of recruitment process.

Sources said that the Hyderabad RPO office withdrew about 60 such cops from Thatta district on Nov 11 and 12.

The sources said that 42 constables belonging to Thatta police had been denied salaries for the past 20 months despite completing departmental courses. They were told that funds sanctioned for their salaries were used up to pay salaries to lien employees, said the sources.