The 'Notification Fatigue': Why Assam's Aspirants Need a Single Window for SLRC, APSC, and Police Recruitment

Ask any ADRE aspirant in Assam about their morning routine, and chances are it starts the same way. Wake up, make tea, and then the ritual begins. Open the SEBA/SLRC website. Refresh. Nothing new. Switch to the SLPRB portal. Scroll through the same old circulars. Then APSC. Then the Employment Exchange portal. Maybe check the State Health Department site too, just in case something slipped through.

This isn't dedication. This is desperation dressed up as discipline.

Across Assam, lakhs of young people preparing for government jobs have become unwilling experts in portal navigation. They know which websites crash on Mondays, which ones update silently without timestamps, and which ones bury new notifications under three layers of menus. They've memorized the quirks of each interface the way students in other states memorize formulas and dates.

And somewhere along the way, this became normal. We stopped asking why it had to be this complicated in the first place.

The Fragmentation Nobody Talks About

Here's the thing about Assam's recruitment ecosystem that everyone experiences but nobody questions: it's hopelessly fragmented. Grade III and Grade IV positions fall under SEBA or SLRC. Police recruitment goes through SLPRB. Officer-level positions are handled by APSC. Forest department has its own portal. Health has another. Education runs its own show.

For a student who's open to any government opportunity—and let's be honest, most are—this means monitoring five to seven different websites daily. Some of these portals don't even have proper notification systems. They don't send emails. There's no SMS alert service worth mentioning. You either check manually, or you miss out.

I spoke with Ranjit Das, a 24-year-old from Nalbari who's been preparing for government exams for three years now. "I spend almost an hour every day just checking different websites," he told me. "And most days, there's nothing new. But the one day I skip checking? That's when something important comes out, and I find out two days later when half the seats are already filled."

This anxiety isn't irrational. It's a perfectly logical response to a system that punishes you for looking away even for a moment.

The Mental Toll We're Ignoring

There's a term in psychology called "decision fatigue." It describes how the quality of our decisions deteriorates after a long session of decision-making. But what we're seeing in Assam's job aspirant community is something adjacent—call it "notification fatigue." The constant vigilance, the endless refreshing, the low-grade anxiety that something might slip past you while you were having lunch.

This takes a real psychological toll. Students I've spoken to describe feeling perpetually on edge. They check their phones during family dinners. They set alarms for odd hours because some websites seem to update at strange times. Sleep patterns get disrupted. Study time gets eaten up by portal-hopping.

And the cruel irony? All this monitoring time comes directly out of preparation time. Every hour spent refreshing SLPRB is an hour not spent solving previous year papers. Every anxious portal check is mental energy not being used for actual learning.

We've essentially created a system where the most diligent students—the ones who refuse to miss a single notification—end up with less time to actually prepare for the exams they're so desperate to find.

What Would Actually Help

The solution isn't complicated. It's actually embarrassingly simple: a unified dashboard that aggregates notifications from all major recruitment bodies in one place. One website to check instead of seven. One bookmark instead of a folder full of portals. One source of truth.

Now, in an ideal world, the state government would build this. They'd create a single Assam Recruitment Portal that pulls in feeds from APSC, SLRC, SLPRB, and all departmental hiring. But we've been waiting for "ideal world" solutions for decades now, and students can't afford to wait any longer.

To solve this fragmentation, platforms like KarmSakha have stepped in with practical solutions. Their dedicated Assam Government Jobs Dashboard aggregates live feeds from SLRC, APSC, and SLPRB into a single, clean list. It's not a government solution, but it addresses a genuine pain point that the government hasn't gotten around to fixing.

Whether it's this platform or another, the point stands: aggregation is the answer. Students shouldn't have to be human RSS feeds, manually pulling updates from a dozen scattered sources. Technology exists to solve exactly this kind of problem. We use it for everything else—news, social media, shopping alerts. Why should government job notifications be stuck in 2005?

A Modest Proposal

To the students reading this: your frustration is valid. The system is genuinely broken, and it's not your fault that you have to work around it. Seek out tools that reduce your cognitive load. Automate what you can. And don't feel guilty about wanting things to be easier—efficiency isn't laziness.

To the policymakers who might stumble upon this: your students are exhausted. Not from studying, but from the bureaucratic obstacle course they have to run just to find out what to study for. A unified recruitment portal isn't a luxury—it's a basic respect for their time and mental peace.

And to everyone else: the next time you hear about the "unemployed youth problem" in Assam, remember that a good chunk of their productive hours are being wasted on portal maintenance. Fix the infrastructure, and you might be surprised how much more prepared these candidates become.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting it exists. Assam's recruitment notification system is fragmented, confusing, and mentally draining for students. It's time we stopped treating this as normal and started demanding better.

Our aspirants deserve a single window. They've earned that much.

(The views, opinions, and claims in this article are solely those of the author’s and do not represent the editorial stance of The Assam Tribune)