A clipping of a newspaper ad on hiring of doctors by the West Bengal Health Recruitment Board has gone viral, with social media users highlighting that there were no vacancies for the general category.
On October 17, Supreme Court lawyer and X user Shashank Shekhar Jha, who often shares pro-Right content, posted the image of a West Bengal Health Recruitment Board circular with the caption “Vacancy for Medical Officer in Bengal: 528 Vacancy for Unreserved: 0 Reservation: 100%”. (Archive)
Vacancy for Medical Officer in Bengal: 528
Vacancy for Unreserved: 0
Reservation: 100% pic.twitter.com/6MmsGr8cQH— Shashank Shekhar Jha (@shashank_ssj) October 17, 2025
X user Dr Rajeshwari Iyer also shared the ad, pointing out the ‘anomaly’. “Imagine studying 5.5 years to become a doctor, dedicating your life to serve the nation and yet, the government can’t offer you a single seat. General Category has become the new Jews,” she wrote. (Archive)
Total Vacancy – 528
Seats for General Category – 0Imagine studying 5.5 years to become a doctor, dedicating your life to serve the nation and yet, the government can’t offer you a single seat.
General Category has become the new Jews. pic.twitter.com/YJ857EMDv2
— Dr. Rajeshwari Iyer (@RajeshwariRW) October 16, 2025
Several other users posted images of the same ad, pointing out that it had zero vacancies for unreserved or general category candidates. (Archives: 1, 2, 3)
Fact Check
Jha and others appear to have overlooked an important detail in the image they shared. That is, the phrase “Special Drive for Reserved Categories”. It is prominently displayed in bold at the top. This ad announced the second cycle of the special drive.
The longer version of the circular, carrying details of the scale of pay, qualifications and prerequisites (age, fee, etc.) can be found on the West Bengal Health Recruitment Board’s official website. “This is a special drive for reserved category. No UR candidates [except UR (PWD)] are eligible to apply against this particular advertisement” is also written in bold.
When called out for his misleading tweet, Jha criticised the concept of special recruitment drives and asked, “when reserved categories can be part of the UR list, why not include the general category in such special recruitment drives?”. The sentence, readers might agree, makes little sense.
Special drives are regular initiatives conducted in government institutions, such as colleges and workplaces, to address the backlog of job vacancies for scheduled castes and scheduled Ttribes. According to a 2010 statement by then Union home minister P Chidambaram, Rajiv Gandhi carried out the first special drive during 1986-87 when he was the Prime Minister and filled up 55,000 backlog vacancies for SC/ST in various government departments.
These drives are also organized for central government jobs and for academic positions at central universities and institutions.
According to an Office Memorandum issued by the Union government’s department of personnel & training, dated November 19, 2008, the government decided to launch a new special recruitment drive to clear existing backlog vacancies for SCs, STs, and OBCs in both direct recruitment and promotion quotas. This follows a similar initiative from 2004 in which about 56,000 vacancies were filled. Among the key guidelines are,
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Vacancies reserved for SCs, STs, and OBCs in direct recruitment cannot be dereserved. If suitable candidates are unavailable, those vacancies remain unfilled and become backlog vacancies for future recruitment years.
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For promotion quotas, if there are not enough SC/ST candidates fit for promotion, the reserved vacancies can be dereserved and filled with candidates from other communities. If neither SC/ST nor other categories are available, these remain unfilled and become backlog vacancies.
To sum up, Right-wing influencer Shashank Shekhar Jha and others shared an ad for a recruitment drive by the West Bengal government highlighting that there were no vacancies in the unreserved category, and portrayed it as a case of discrimination. In reality, the ad was for a special drive for reserved categories. Hence it is obvious that there would be no unreserved vacancies.
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