Railway jobs: Railways Ministry clarifies that recruitment of 9,000 candidates is fake news

The Ministry of Railways and the Railway Protection Force (RPF) on Friday issued a statement rubbishing claims that the recruitment of 9,000 posts of constables is underway. Terming the message as ‘fictitious’, the ministry clarified that no such notification has been issued by RPF or Ministry of Railways on their official websites or through any print or electronic media.

According to the statement, some websites have published a notice that the RPF is conducting a recruitment drive through the RPF Constable Recruitment 2022 exam, and the process will start soon.

Clarifying that the ministry has not initiated any such process, the statement said no such recruitment notice has been published by the RPF.

Earlier in August, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, in a statement during the Monsoon session in Parliament, said that Indian Railways is a large organization and that recruitment is a continuous process.

In June, Railways said it will recruit 1,48,463 applicants in the next one year as compared to the 43,678 people hired annually on average in the last 8 years. Earlier, PM Narendra Modi had asked the ministries and various government departments to recruit 10 lakh people in the next 1.5 years.

Responding to supplementary questions during Question Hour, Vaishnaw had said that the Railways has majorly contributed to providing employment to aspirants, where 18,000 jobs have been provided alone this year.

He added that the Railways taking steps to provide one lakh and 40,000 jobs as per Modi's announcement of providing 10 lakh jobs.  

In his written reply to the upper house, Vaishnaw said the vacancies keep cropping up due to retirement, resignation, and death, and the vacancies are regularly filled up as per operational requirements.

As per the reply, around 10,189 candidates have been recruited in the last two years. At present, recruitment and filling up of vacancies in direct recruitment grade for approximately 1,59,062 posts are in the pipeline and soon will be completed.

Vaishnaw added that besides filling up regular vacancies, new jobs are also being created through outsourcing of non-core activities, and execution of projects, which are mostly contractual jobs and are done through external agencies.