Andhra’s Transparent Recruitment Comes With Seven Explanations
When the marks do not fit the rules, the file apparently takes a scenic route through seven verification stages.
Andhra Pradesh’s Mega DSC was advertised as a jobs exercise covering roughly 16,347 teacher posts. It has now become a philosophical inquiry into whether 65 is the new 75, provided the file travels through seven rooms.
The notified TET thresholds cited in the dispute were 90 marks for OC candidates, 75 for BC candidates and 60 for SC/ST candidates. YSRCP has pointed to an alleged OC appointment in Chittoor involving 79 marks and a purported BC appointment in Kurnool involving 65. These are allegations, not findings. But they are also not improved by the government’s chosen response: Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu declaring on September 21 that there was “no scope for irregularities”, while specific questions remained very much in scope.
Jagan Mohan Reddy highlighted a candidate said to have received a post after scoring 65 marks and clearing seven stages of verification. Officials then said the candidate had scored 77 in a 2018 TET attempt. This may be a valid procedural explanation. It may also be the sort of explanation that requires a second explanation, followed by a committee to explain why the first explanation was misunderstood. Either way, transparency is not the government saying the file is clean. It is showing the file, the rules applied, and the arithmetic that made the appointment possible.
The allegations of payments ranging from ₹15 lakh to ₹20 lakh remain allegations and require investigation, not a verdict delivered by political microphone. That is precisely why an independent inquiry would be more useful than competing certainties. Instead, a demand to inspect the machinery is treated as an attack on the machinery, and a protest outside the Sports Authority office becomes the disturbance worth discussing. The governing coalition’s familiar choreography is now complete: announce values, deny wrongdoing, produce one administrative footnote, and call scrutiny political. Naidu has also said he could arrest Jagan “within a minute” but chooses restraint for the people’s benefit. The people might settle for a recruitment file that does not need seven-stage theology.
A government can survive an awkward question. A teacher recruitment process should survive one too.
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