More than a month has passed since more than 200,000 candidates sat for the recruitment tests to fill up the more than five and a half thousand vacant third and fourth class posts at the family planning directorate.
Experts said computers should not take more than two days to finish checking the tests, which were taken in optical mark recognition (OMR) answer sheets.
The fact that the authorities are taking so long to publish the results has raised many eyebrows.
Candidates suspect that a hefty bribe business is going on behind the curtains because the ratio of examinees to vacant posts is very high.
The Directorate General of Family Planning (DGFP) held the tests on June 21, 22 and 28 to fill up 5,594 vacancies at various levels.
The written tests carried 70 marks and those who were selected were supposed to sit in a 30 mark viva-voce for final recruitment.
Officials concerned with the recruitment process said the delay was a result of the fact that most of the staff of the DGFP had been busy with various other things during the “June closing” and hence could not manage time to finalise the test results.
June closing refers to the end of a fiscal year.
A reliable source in the DGFP claimed that the results might be published at any time during the last week of July or the first week of August.
Conversely, there are allegations that the delay is in fact a result of a number ministers, ruling party lawmakers, government’s secretaries and advisors trying to fill their pockets by taking bribes from the examinees by assuring them that their jobs would be confirmed.
Thousands of examinees are thronging the DGFP office in the capital’s Karwanbazar every day.
Apparently, all of them had recommendations from influential persons, whom they claimed they had paid bribes to.
There are allegations that the bribes that these influential people took varied between Tk200,000 and Tk900,000, depending on the weight of the post.
Such allegations were also made in 2011, the last time DGFP made similar recruitments for 6,000 vacant posts.
However, DGFP Director (administration) Dr Mahbubur Rahman, member secretary of the central examination committee, snubbed out all such allegations.
He told the Dhaka Tribune that people started smelling bribery every time the number of candidates was huge compared to the number of vacant posts in a government recruitment test.
Then again, he said it would be hard for them to pinpoint whether any of the 54,000 employees of the DGFP personally took bribes from the candidates.
He claimed that the authorities have tried their level best to make sure that the recruitments were done based on capabilities.
Another complication regarding the code number of upazilas also reportedly contributed to the delay.
Sources said the government has recently awarded fresh code numbers to some 16 upazilas around the country, which the candidates for any government recruitment test must mention in the answer sheet.
Since the candidates from those 16 upazilas had not been informed about the new numbers, they mentioned the old numbers in their answer sheets.
As a result, the computers would automatically withhold the results whenever an old code number was found.
Dr Mahbubur Rahman said they were trying to solve the problem and publish the results as quickly as possible.