On Sunday, all three remaining members of the Jharkhand Public Service Commission resigned within hours of each other. Ajeeta Bhattacharya, Anima Hansda and Jamal Ahmad each stepped down after being summoned by the state’s Criminal Investigation Department for questioning over allegations of large-scale irregularities, including paper leaks, in the commission’s examinations. Their resignations followed that of JPSC chairperson L Khiangte weeks earlier, on July 22. In effect, the entire leadership of the body responsible for selecting Jharkhand’s civil servants has now departed under a cloud, mid-investigation, before a single hearing has produced a verdict on anyone’s individual culpability.
There is a legitimate reading in which this looks like accountability working exactly as it should: officials facing serious allegations step aside, investigators get an unobstructed field to work, and the institution signals it will not shield its own leadership. But there is a second, less comfortable reading that deserves equal attention — a public service commission cannot function without its members, and a body meant to certify the integrity of Jharkhand’s recruitment process is, at this moment, being run by no one at all. Both readings can be true simultaneously, and the tension between them is precisely the problem India’s state public service commissions have never adequately resolved: what happens to the institution while the individuals inside it are being investigated.
The deeper question the JPSC collapse raises is structural, not personal. These commissions are constitutional bodies, created under Article 315 specifically to insulate recruitment from political interference — members serve fixed terms and enjoy protections against arbitrary removal precisely so that ministers of the day cannot pressure them into favouring particular candidates. That insulation is valuable and worth preserving. But the same independence that protects commissions from political meddling also means there is remarkably little routine, proactive oversight of whether the commission’s own internal processes — its outsourcing contracts, its printing and sealing protocols, its vetting of the private agencies it hires to conduct exams — are being audited before a scandal forces the question. Jharkhand outsourced JPSC and JSSC exam conduct to private firms including TSR Data Processing and Webel; it was only after CID investigators started pulling threads that the public learned how thoroughly those contracting relationships had allegedly been compromised, in some cases across more than a decade of unrelated central and state examinations.
A commission that resigns wholesale under investigative pressure has, at least, been caught. The harder institutional reform is building the kind of independent, recurring audit function — of vendor selection, of exam security protocols, of internal financial controls — that would catch this sort of syndicate before it operates for years across a dozen different exams, rather than after. Jharkhand’s students are right to want a CBI probe into what already happened. The state, and every other Indian state whose recruitment runs through a public service commission, owes them and future candidates something more: a watcher for the watchers, in place before the next scandal, not assembled in response to it.
— DA Editorial Desk (Sara Debbarma)