Kerala State IT Mission: No Emailed resumes please
By Shalini Singh

The Kerala State IT Mission, the government agency tasked with promoting the use of IT and e-governance has advertised for an opening in the leading newspapers in Kerala today. The candidate should have a minimum of seven years experience in the relevant area with excellent computer skills, especially in Office packages.

Everything is fine in the advertisement except the fact that ‘No emails are accepted’.  Locals find this amusing as Kerala has almost complete literacy as well as a very computing savvy populace.

Candidates have to download the application form from their website and send the duly filled application (by post or courier). So much for an organisation that provides managerial support to the various IT initiatives of the government.

The Kerala State IT Mission is an autonomous nodal IT implementation agency for the Department of Information Technology of the Kerala Government. The IT portfolio is handled by none other than the Kerala Chief Minister himself. Some of the responsibilities of the IT Mission are strengthening the IT / ITES industry base, ICT dissemination to bridge the digital divide, E- Governance and developing Human Resources for IT & ITES. All noble thoughts but this seems to be yet another classic example of the wide gap between practising what you preach!

I decided to check out the career page of their website www.itmission.kerala.gov.in and was really surprised to see that emails are not accepted for any of the five openings advertised there. What IT implementation are we talking about if a job aspirant cannot apply by email which is the standard for any opening these days!

Techgoss has in the past carried stories about the various failed initiatives of the IT Mission.