The State government’s recruitment drive for the posts of grama volunteers and ward volunteers has been receiving huge response from youth across the State. Within the first two days of opening the portal for registrations, more than one lakh persons submitted applications.

As of 9 pm on Tuesday, as many as 1,00, 366 persons from all the districts had applied for the post of village and ward volunteers.

Though only about 35,000 aspirants submitted their applications on the first day due to bandwidth issues and delay in sending of one-time password, nearly double the number of persons signed up on the second day.

A huge number of applications came from Kurnool district with about 13,000 submissions. It is followed by Visakhapatnam and East Godavari districts from where over 9,000 each applications were submitted.

The Real-Time Governance Society, which has developed the website (gramavolunteer.ap.gov.in), in a release said that the website received more than six lakh hits.

Aadhaar not mandatory

Aadhaar is not made mandatory at the time of registration and applicants can register using mobile number but have to come up with Aadhaar within 10 days and submit the same.

Aspirants were thronging Internet centres to submit the applications as one needs to submit scanned copies of all education qualifications starting from SSC and address proofs other than Aadhaar.

Though the government order regarding the recruitment did not specify the final number of volunteers to be recruited, it is planned to have at least one village volunteer per every 50 households in rural areas and one ward volunteer per year 100 households in urban areas.

Applications will be received up to July 5 and they will be scrutinised before July 10 after which interviews for selection would be conducted between July 11 and July 25.

In Krishna district, there is a requirement of 8,500 ward volunteers to serve in the eight urban local bodies, according to Collector A. Md. Imtiaz.

Website trouble

While the Panchayat Raj & Rural Development Department takes care of recruitment of village volunteers in rural areas, Municipal Administration and Urban Development Department takes care of recruitment of ward volunteers in urban local bodies.

The departments would have to spend ₹ 13.50 crore towards the training of village volunteers and ₹ 3.44 crore for ward volunteers.

Meanwhile, the designated website for the ward volunteers (wardvolunteer.ap.gov.in) was not working. However, grama volunteer website has been accepting applications of both the village and ward volunteers.