The mania called civil service exams—government breathes uneasy
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: After enjoying a brief basking in the glory-of-victory period, the new NDA government has started facing heat.
A storm has begun to brew and is threatening to lash out against the government led by BJP supremo Narendra Modi for its move to tweak the rules to qualify for the country’s (still) most coveted government job, the civil services.
In one of the first adverse reaction to the Modi government, the screening test for the Civil Services exam is fast becoming a pain that is threatening to disrupt Parliament and create deep fissures in the country over political lines.
The highly politicized issue has forced the government to blink first. They have flung the contentious English marks in the preliminary Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT) out of the window.
Announcing this to belligerent and raucous members of both the houses of the Parliament, minister of state for personnel Jitendra Singh said that ‘’the government is of the opinion that in the Civil Services preliminary examination, the marks of the question-section on ‘English language comprehension skills’ should not be included for gradation and merit’’.
Parliament has been witness to several adjournments and ruckus in the past few days over the issue.
Agitating students have been demanding that the pattern of CSAT be changed to give level-playing field to those coming from rural areas. There are two compulsory papers of 200 marks each in the preliminary examination. These papers are also known as CSAT-I and CSAT-II. The CSAT-II paper carries questions on comprehension, inter-personal skills including communication skills, logical reasoning and analytical ability, decision-making and problem-solving, general mental ability, basic numeracy, and English language comprehension skills of tenth grade standard.
The civil services examination is conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) in three stages–preliminary, main, and interview–to choose candidates for Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and Indian Police Service (IPS), among others.
Students have objected to the level of aptitude and English language questions being asked in the examination, claiming they are much above the standard prescribed for the examination.
More particularly, Hindi-medium aspirants have objected to this pattern and lament that many aspirants lack English proficiency and have put the Hindi-medium students at a disadvantage when cracking the CSAT. Others argue that the translation into Hindi is so skewed that it is even difficult for a Hindi scholar to comprehend the questions leave alone writing them.
The Hindi-medium aspirants say that the level of math and aptitude tests are also tough and that it’s difficult for students from humanities and arts streams to answer them.
The pressure to change the rules for English, seemingly from Hindi speaking states, is also because an overwhelming number of aspirants represent these regions who try to attempt writing the exam – a conduit to a sure-shot gateway to fame, power and wealth, not only for themselves but for the their families and their immediate circle of influence.
There is also some truth in the argument that the civil services – a vestige of India’s colonial past – is seen by many as a means to perpetuate a feudal past that would enable the successful candidate to ‘rule’ once he gets entrenched into the bureaucratic set up.
Many of the northern states with its high indices of polarization between the haves and have-nots, a selection to the civil service is seen as salvation from endemic poverty and a passport to the high-life via perks like a beacon car, house and a retinue of servants for the rest of the serving life. And in many cases, it means a new level of sale-ability, especially in the marriage market, that could fetch unimaginable dowry.
The intense clamor for removing one such hurdle – English language – from the way, to achieve invincibility in a social set up for those who had been wallowing in impoverishment and centuries of caste and class discrimination, especially in northern India, is understandable.
It’s also an unconscious inner desire by the Indian to emulate the Sahib, the British, who lorded over India for couple of centuries.
The complete removal of the CSAT exams have been doing the rounds for some time. And it has become a political issue with states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar throwing in their might to abolish the screening system altogether.
On Tuesday, opposition parties continued to demand its complete scrapping from the examination conducted by the UPSC. Samajwadi Party (SP) threatened to disrupt the proceedings of the Parliament till CSAT is scrapped entirely from the civil services examination.
SP leader Naresh Agarwal warned that they would give notice to Parliament regarding this issue and stop the functioning of Parliament until CSAT is scrapped.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) also said the “arrogant” government has not met the demand to remove CSAT and is doing an injustice to students.
(This story was revised on August 6, 2014).
(Rajiv Theodore is India Bureau Chief, The American Bazaar)