Few days ago when I was visiting a center conducting written test for Canara Bank, I saw huge number of people outside the building. Fortunately, the center is a school and has a big play ground to accommodate such number of people. I was so curious why such huge number of people are writing that exam?

Is it because the number of posts huge? Or because the pay package is big? Or is a highly prestegious job which is equally important to the top level jobs in India?

Not at all. I found later, by investigating few applicants, that the written test is conducting for few number of posts in various streams. The number of posts are less than hundred, though spread in to multiple streams. Out of which, I was surprised with the number of people writing the exam for one stream. It is none other than the Computer Programmers. The reason is there are in total 7 posts available out of which 2 posts available under the general category. To my surprise, most of the people competing for those 2 posts only.

I found, later, that the bank was given the advertisement for direct interview for those 7 posts and later decides to conduct the written test as the number of applications received are not feasible to conduct the direct interview.

This is just one incidence showing the huge demand for the governement jobs in these recessionary times. Not only this there are quite few incidents in the recent times. For example, the Syndicate Bank has advertised that they will recruit over 1200 posts for with the direct interview for all those who are graduates. And the result is awesome. There are gossips in the streets that over 3 lakh applications are received for these posts. However, some people who enquired the officials saying about two lakh applications have been received and the officials have got no clues on how to conduct the interviews for these many people.

The other side of the coin in painful to all the job seekers. All those mass recruiting PSU companies are making money by these recruitment in the way of application fee. recently the BSNL has given an advertisement to recruit the people for the Joint Telecom Officer(JTO) posts and the number of applications are again huge. It is learnt that they have made over Rs. 5 crore by the way of application fee which is costing Rs. 750. There are few government companies who are charging over Rs 1000 as application fee in India.