The Congress party staged a protest on Wednesday demanding the regularisation of personnel recruited through the Haryana Kaushal Rozgar Nigam (HKRN). Thousands of party workers gathered outside the HKRN office but were stopped by police barricades. They raised slogans and pressed for their demands.
The protest was led by former Chief Minister and Leader of Opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda and state president Rao Narendra. Several party MPs, MLAs, former legislators, senior leaders and workers also participated.
Addressing the protesters, Hooda accused the BJP government of exploiting youth through the HKRN. He demanded that all HKRN workers be regularised in government service and given equal pay, DA, promotion opportunities, reservation and retirement benefits. He also called for future appointments to be made through regular recruitment.
Hooda alleged that the government was filling even gazetted posts through the contractual system, which he said was weakening reservation provisions for Dalits, backward classes and economically weaker sections.
He said the Congress government had increased the number of government posts to four lakh to create employment and improve public services, but the BJP government had reduced the number to 2.5 lakh.
Hooda said Congress would continue its agitation until the government restored four lakh posts and regularised HKRN workers. He claimed the BJP had promised to regularise 1.25 lakh skilled contractual workers ahead of the Assembly elections but had failed to implement the promise.
He said the government issued a notification on August 15, 2024, but no law or formal order confirming regularisation had followed. As a result, workers continued to face uncertainty over their jobs, he claimed.
Hooda also alleged that the BJP had misled HKRN workers and their families during the elections by claiming that a Congress government would remove them. He said Congress had consistently demanded job security, contract renewals and better wages for these workers.
He further claimed that the Congress government's policy on regularising contractual workers had been upheld by courts, including the High Court and Supreme Court, and had benefited thousands of workers.
Hooda described HKRN as a system that supplies skilled youth to government departments and public bodies on temporary contracts and low wages. He alleged that workers were effectively being treated as labourers rather than government employees and that one per cent of their wages was deducted.
He also criticised the Policy on the Deployment of Contractual Persons, 2022, saying its terminology used terms such as “deployment”, “wages”, “job role”, “posting” and “contractual persons” instead of “appointment”, “salary”, “post”, “transfer” and “employees”.
Hooda alleged that this system denied workers formal legal rights and undermined recruitment bodies such as HPSC and HSSC by shifting their functions to HKRN.
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