Permanent Work, Temporary People

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20 Apr 2026

J&K's government has spent years extracting full-time labour from contractual workers while withholding the regularisation it has repeatedly promised. That is not a policy gap. It is a choice

There is a category of workers in Jammu and Kashmir's government establishment who do not officially exist in any meaningful sense. He reports to work every day. He performs the same duties as a permanent employee in the same office. He has done so, in many cases, for a decade or more. He receives a fraction of the salary, no pension, no job security, and no legal recourse when his contract is arbitrarily terminated. He is, in the government's accounting, a temporary arrangement. The arrangement has become permanent. Across J&K's health, education, revenue, and social welfare departments, contractual and daily-wage workers form a structural layer of the workforce without whom those departments would cease to function. Para-teachers have kept schools running in areas where regular teachers were never posted. Contractual health workers have staffed sub-centres and primary health facilities across the Valley and in Jammu's hill districts. Sanitation workers on daily wages have maintained urban infrastructure; their regularised counterparts were never deployed to cover.

The government has acknowledged this reality through successive announcements of regularisation policies, the establishment of review committees, and cabinet decisions. Each announcement has been followed by partial implementation, legal challenges, and fresh deferrals. The workers wait. The departments continue operating on their labour. The accountability question is direct: which authority within the J&K administration is responsible for the gap between regularisation orders issued and regularisation actually completed? That question has no published answer. The government must publish a department-wise count of all contractual and daily-wage workers currently employed, the duration of their service, and a binding timeline for regularisation of those who meet the qualifying criteria. Anything short of that is not a policy. It is a continuation of the exploitation it claims to be addressing. Permanent work demands permanent recognition. J&K's government has known this for years. The workers have waited long enough