The shortage of young medicos belonging to the reserved categories is hitting the State health services of Uttarakhand hard.  In the forthcoming recruitment of medical officers, the Uttarakhand Medical Services Selection Board (UMSSB) more than 70 percent of total posts would be kept reserved. Recently the state administration has sent a requisition of recruitment for 314 medical officers to the UMSSB. The board is expected to release the recruitment advertisement soon.

The Chairman of UMSSB, Dr D S Rawat said that in the drive 86 posts out of 314 would be for general category candidates while rest would be kept reserved. He said that online application forms would be invited for the eligible candidates for the post of medical officers. The selected MO would be inducted in the pay scale of 56100- 177500 (level 10) of state health services.

It is worth mentioning here that in the recruitment advertisement released in month of October 2017 a total of 712 posts were released. Of these 200 were reserved for Schedule Caste, 33 for Schedule Tribe (ST) while 154 were reserved for the Other Backward Castes (OBC).  More than 1600 candidates applied for 712 posts of medical officers in the recruitment drive out of them 1400 appeared for the interviews. In view of the less number of candidates belonging to the reserved category, the UMSSB extended the last date of application many times.

The board was so lenient that it allowed new candidates to apply even during the course of interviews which continued till last week of December. Even after many attempts of the board 231 posts of belonging to reserved categories remained vacant.

Interestingly these vacant posts of medical officers cannot be filled by candidates of general category as the backlog is needed to be filled first.