On the instructions of the Narendra Modi led Union government, the Jammu and Kashmir government has decided to give one job to one non-migrant family of Kashmiri Pandits. A state government official told The Sunday Guardian that they will shortlist 500 candidates from the 810 Hindu families who have been living in Kashmir.
The Centre has fast tracked all the recent decisions taken to address the issues in Jammu and Kashmir, especially the human issues. After announcing a package to families that had migrated to Jammu in 1947, the Union Home Ministry has instructed the state government to provide one government job to each family of non-migrant Hindus in the Kashmir valley.
West Pakistani refugees and those Hindu families who migrated from POK to Jammu are in the process of receiving the Central package. The Hindu Welfare Society of Kashmir has welcomed the move and said that they were completely neglected in the past many years. “We have been living in poverty. Employment to each family will provide the much needed financial cushion,” said one of the members of the society to this newspaper. A senior officer of the state government told The Sunday Guardian that Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir, Baser Ahmed Khan will select candidates from the few hundred non migrant Pandit families.
The president of Kashmir Pandit Sangarsh Simiti told The Sunday Guardian that he hopes that the procedures will be completed very soon. He said that these families were discriminated by successive Central governments. Sanjay Tikku further told The Sunay Guardian that he had filed a writ petition in the J&K High Court few years back seeking directions to the Central and state governments to extend the Prime Minister’s package to those Kashmiri Hindus living in the valley.