In a startling exposure to the previous Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government, the Delhi Government’s Directorate of Employment disclosed that only two people secured jobs through two government-run online employment portals between 2019 and 2024. Both placements happened in 2024. The Directorate of Employment revealed these facts.
Interestingly, until 2020, Delhi had only one appointment portal. However, in July 2020, the government launched a second platform named the ‘Rozgar Bazaar’ portal. Despite being active for less than three years, this portal was shut down in 2023. Yet, two employees are still assigned to maintain the defunct platform.
The Directorate of Employment (DoE) data reveals that 176 jobs were provided in 2015, 102 in 2016, 66 in 2017, 68 in 2018, 0 in 2019, 0 in 2020, 0 in 2021, 0 in 2022, 0 in 2023 and 2 in 2024. The portal was non-functional from October 2018 to November 2021 due to technical reasons. The portal has failed to provide jobs, it has incurred an expenditure of approximately `34 lakh since 2021 for salary payment and nearly `2 lakh were spent to maintain the portal.
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Delhi’s appointment portals failed to facilitate employment. For five years starting from 2019 to 2023, not a single job was provided through these platforms. The older employment portal, operational since 2009 (onlineemploymentportal.delhi.gov.in), has five employees for its maintenance, along with six contracted technical staff. Between 2015 and 2024, around 4.4 lakh unemployed individuals registered with the Delhi government’s employment offices. In an attempt to provide employment opportunities, the government organised 10 job fairs in the last 10 years; nearly `1.05 crore were spent to organise them.
Employment portals yielded only two jobs
However, only 36,000 candidates were shortlisted. Furthermore, the government confirmed that no new employment exchanges have been established in the last ten years.
Notably, the Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP government had spent 10 years claiming that “we know how to give employment” and “we have given 10 lakh jobs in Delhi”, promoting its record in poll campaigns across multiple States, including in Punjab in 2022. In March 2022, the AAP government in Delhi had named its annual Budget as the ‘Rozgar Budget’, using the Hindi word for employment, and promised to create 20 lakh jobs over the next five years. Almost all the projects announced under the Rozgar Budget remain non-starters, including a job portal called Rozgar Bazaar 2.0, which was supposed to provide 25% of the promised 20 lakh jobs.
