A website – ‘Kisan Vikas Mitra Samithi’ (‘किसान विकास मित्र समिति’) (kvms.org.in), which looks official government website belonging to the Department of Agriculture Cooperation and Farmers Welfare, is offering jobs for various positions in the Agriculture sector. The State Emblem of India on the website suggests that it claims to be a government website as private websites cannot use the emblem. The recruitment page lists various positions like Agriculture Field Surveyor, Agriculture Officer, Agriculture Security Assistant, etc. To apply for jobs, the website asks the aspirants to pay 500 rupees for each post. Let’s fact-check the authenticity of the website.
Claim: Apply for the Agriculture sector jobs on the government website ‘Kisan Vikas Mitra Samithi’ (kvms.org.in) by paying the submission fees.
Fact: It is not a government website. It is a dubious website which has been intentionally designed to look like the official Agriculture department website so that people can be duped to pay money for fake recruitments. Hence the claim that it provides government jobs is FALSE.
We found various clues that suggest that the website is a dubious one. Let’s look at each of them below:
1. Domain Name
The given website has ‘.org.in’. But the ‘Guidelines for Indian Government Websites’ mentions – ‘all Indian Government websites MUST use ‘gov.in’ or ‘nic.in’ domain exclusively allotted and restricted to Government websites’.
2. Website name:
On the website, the main heading in Hindi text reads – ‘किसान विकास मित्र समिति’ (‘Kisan Vikas Mitra Samithi’) whereas the English text reads – ‘DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE COOPERATION & FARMERS WELFARE’. No information was found regarding ‘Kisan Vikas Mitra Samithi’. The original website does not mention anywhere about ‘Kisan Vikas Mitra Samithi’.
3. Recruitment:
On filling the basic details on the website, the aspirants are asked to pay 500 rupees for each post.
But, previously, addressing a similar fraud the Ministry has said – ‘It may please be noted that recruitment in Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare is carried out through a well-established selection procedure mainly through Staff Selection Commission / Union Public Service Commission’.
4. Inconsistency in dates:
While the published date for the recruitment notice is given as ‘20-09-2020’, the job title mentions – ‘Agriculture Security Assistant (ASA) Recruitment 2019’. We also found that the link to the same page was posted on Facebook in August 2019. So, an old fraud is revived again by just changing the dates to 2020.
5. Old pictures and content
The photos and documents (in the ‘What’s New’ section) on the fake website are old. Some of the similar photos and documents (in the ‘What’s New’ section) were found in the ‘June 2019’ archived version of the original website. So, the fake website might have been developed in 2019 with the then available content on the original website.
To sum it up, the Kisan Vikas Mitra Samithi website (kvms.org.in) offering jobs in the Agriculture sector is a dubious website.
