Five hundred and thirty eight candidates. Still no merit list.
Urban Bystander
The merit list did not leak. That, in Islamabad, was the first sign something had gone wrong.
In February 2025, the Capital Development Authority advertised 192 posts across its engineering, environment and planning wings. Building Inspectors. Range Officers. Assistant Directors. Sub-Engineers. The queue formed, and because this is Islamabad, it formed correctly.
NUST conducted the screening tests in May 2025. Interviews followed in December. Five hundred and thirty-eight candidates were eventually shortlisted. The processing fees, according to petitioners’ counsel before the Islamabad High Court, came to roughly Rs140 million. The money, at least, appears to have joined immediately.
For the candidates, the process came with actual paperwork. An application form. A fee receipt. A test slip. An interview call letter. And somewhere at the end of it, there ought to have been a merit list. The first four objects belonged to the physical world. The fifth entered public administration.
One of the candidates told Dawn that he had passed the NUST test, appeared for the interview and still did not know why CDA was “sitting on our file.” January passed. February. March. April. May. Five months is a manageable interval in a file. It is longer when the file concerns the possibility of a job.
The candidates had gone home after their interviews. Their file, apparently, had stayed behind.
In May 2026, six candidates complained to the Federal Ombudsman. The Ombudsman’s finding noted that the results had been withheld for five months with “no plausible justification” and directed CDA to publish the merit list within thirty days. CDA’s representative, present at the hearing, agreed. The complaints were disposed of, with compliance to be reported within the same thirty-day period.
There was, however, a small administrative curiosity.
CDA later maintained that the recruitment had already been scrapped before the Ombudsman’s order was issued. This meant its representative had agreed to publish the merit list for a recruitment process the authority said had already ceased to exist.
Not the delay. Not the five-month silence. The recruitment itself.
CDA explained that most members of the recruitment committee had changed, more than six months had elapsed and the authority believed the process should start afresh. It was also rationalising vacant posts under the government’s broader restructuring policy.
The recruitment had taken too long. The remedy was another recruitment.
For CDA, starting afresh meant resetting an administrative process. For the candidates, it meant repeating an application, a test and an interview whose result they had still never received. A recruitment exercise that had failed to produce employees had successfully produced litigation.
On 2 September, the Islamabad High Court suspended the cancellation and restrained CDA from filling the vacancies through fresh advertisements, promotions or transfers until further orders. The next hearing was set for 8 September.
According to a Dawn source, the authority now runs four building-control directorates across Islamabad with around fifteen Building Inspectors. In the past, one directorate dealing with the city area had twenty-five. Building Inspector was among the 192 posts it had advertised.
The file has had the more successful career. It passed through every stage and is still in service.
The candidates know they were shortlisted. They have been told nothing about selection. Nothing about rejection. They have, however, been told by CDA’s own careers page to disregard unofficial merit lists circulating on social media.
It is the clearest communication CDA has managed on the subject: a warning against the fake list from the institution that has yet to produce the real one.
The website continues to advise candidates to rely solely on official channels for authentic updates.
They have.
The merit list still hasn’t arrived.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
