LARKANA: The Larkana circuit bench of the Sindh High Court on Thursday issued notices to Inspector General of Police and members of recruitment committee tasked with recruiting 99 constables in special force, directing them to appear in court on Sept 20 over allegations of irregularities and malpractice in the recruitment process leveled by a number of candidates.

The division bench comprising Justices Khadim Hussain Tunio and Shamsuddin Abbasi passed the order on a petition filed by the candidates through their counsel Safdar Ali Ghouri.

The petitioners said that they had applied for the jobs in the wake of an advertisement that appeared in newspapers in December 2021, inviting applications for 92 seats, 88 to be filled on the basis of general merit, four reserved for minorities and nine seats for women, they said.

They said that 30 seats were to be filled in Qambar-Shahdadkot district, 28 under general merit and two each for minority and women to be filled on merit. The advert mentioned that 15 additional marks would be allotted to sons and daughters of the employees having service length of 25 years in police department, they said.

They said that they qualified physical test and appeared in written test conducted by Pakistan Testing Service and obtained between 60 and 78 marks.

The passing candidates, 351 from Larkana and 159 from Qambar-Shahdadkot districts, were called for interview and the recruitment committees were asked to conduct their essay writing tests. The committees were authorised to award 50 marks with a breakup of 30 marks for interview and 20 for essay writing, they explained.

They said that to their surprise they learnt that the respondents had issued a list of successful candidates on Aug 10, 2023, instead of publishing final merit list according to prescribed format showing either sons or daughters of present or former employees of the department, they said, adding that only the recruitment committee at Karachi had followed published final merit list as per the format.

They said that it was done deliberately and with mala fide intentions to accommodate only blue-eyed and politically backed candidates. The respondents’ act was in violation of merit and threw into question the entire recruitment process, they said.

They alleged that the written test was not conducted in a fair and transparent manner as the petitioners Sahil Raza and Noorullah being sons of police officials felt they had been denied 15 additional marks.

They said the respondents had started completing process of successful candidates (72 men and 15 women) in the light of Aug 10 list while transparency demanded that the respondents first issue the final merit list and publish a revised final merit list after incorporating objections if any of all candidates. Only then they should finalise the process of recruitment as the respondents had no lawful justification to withhold publication of the final merit list, they said.

They requested the court to direct the respondents to publish the final merit list as per prescribed format explained in the guidelines for interview process, declare the impugned act of respondents as illegal and in contravention of the guidelines and transparency.

The petition would come up for hearing on Sept 20 when the respondents IGP, DIG Establishment, Karachi; Additional Inspector General of Police CTD Karachi (chairman of Recruitment Board) DIGPs of Hyderabad, Shaheed Benazirabad and Additional Advocate General would be in court.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2023