Being a Scheduled Tribe employment seeker is no matter for privilege, at least sometimes, as is being discovered by the candidates selected for the post of Forest Beat Officers in Telangana. The selection process which took place over an exceptionally lengthy period of time has not ended for the candidates who have been selected for the 86 posts in Agency areas in the six Forest Divisions in former undivided Adilabad district though the candidates belonging to non-tribal category have already reported for duty in June itself.
The tribal candidates are being made to wait for receiving their appointment letters until the appelate authority, the Project Officer of Utnoor Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA), decides on the authenticity of the Local Scheduled Tribe (LST) certificate of five of the selected persons. This has made the other candidates cry foul.
In order to give a fair chance to the tribals to enter lower level employment in government sector in respective local areas, the government had put in place a mechanism. The local Category IV and other posts were reserved for local STs.
“We will lose seniority and all benefits prospectively for no fault of ours. Our certificates have been found to be genuine but we are forced to wait for no fault of ours,” lamented a selected candidate. The notification for recruitment of 1,857 Forest Beat Officers and Forest Section Officers was issued in 2014 and applications were accepted in 2017. While the process of recruiment of FSOs and non-tribal FBO posts is completed, the appointment of Agency posts is hanging fire. The six Forest Divisions in old Adilabad — Adilabad, Mancherial, Jannaram, Bellampalli, Kagaznagar and Nirmal — were alloted a total of 463 posts of which 126 are in the Agency. Adilabad Division accounts for 86 of them.
Appeal of four
The LST certificate verification process was completed in good time by the district level scrutiny committee which found four of those to be not genuine as per Go Ms 24 dated 12/06/2018. The candidates went in appeal about a month back and the issue is pending. “We are eagerly waiting for the candidates to report for duty. It would indeed improve the strength of the forest protection force,” observed a Forest department official while throwing light on the issue.
