New Delhi: UPSC aspirants on Friday protested outside Parliament, demanding the scrapping of the newly-announced Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT), which obstructs the Hindi medium students from getting selected.
On Thursday, they clashed with police, burning vehicles, including a police jeep, and pelting stones near main highway by-pass road in North Delhi’s Burari area, police said. Police resorted to tear gas and lathi-charge to disperse the protesters.
They demand changing of the second paper as it makes it difficult for people coming from rural areas of Hindi-speaking states to crack the exam. The students argue that the questions asked in language comprehension skills are asked in English and no Hindi translations are provided.
Earlier this month, Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh made a statement in the Lok Sabha assuring that no candidate will be discriminated against on the basis of language. But, MPs from UP and Bihar rejected his statement and demanded a discussion on it.Â
What is the controversy all about?
At the heart of the matter is the change of pattern UPSC introduced in the Civil Services Preliminary Exam starting 2011. Till 2010, the exam used to have two papers — one on general studies and one on an optional subject where aspirants could choose one of 23 listed subjects. This was changed from 2011 onwards, when UPSC decided to replace the optional subject paper with a paper that tests the aspirants’ aptitude. The syllabus for this paper, protesting aspirants allege, is heavily tilted in favour of those from the Science or, more specifically, Engineering background and is discriminatory against students from Humanities, particularly those who have studied in Hindi-medium.
What’s the syllabus for this second paper?
The second paper in the preliminary exam comprises comprehension, interpersonal skills including communication skills, logical reasoning and analytical ability, decision making and problem solving, general mental ability, basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude, etc — Class X level), data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency, etc — Class X level) and English language comprehension skills (Class X level).
Why are the protesters calling this syllabus discriminatory?
They feel it favours Science and Engineering students. Questions related to mathematics, they feel, put students from Humanities at a disadvantage. They have also alleged that English language comprehension skills, which the second paper tests, is discriminatory against students from a Hindi-medium background. The protesters claim that since the changes were introduced in 2011, the number of Humanities students clearing the preliminary exam has fallen drastically, while the number of those with Science/Engineering background has shot up.
What’s the government doing?
The matter has been raised by several MPs in the ongoing Parliament session. Union Minister Jitendra Singh has said the government was urging the UPSC and the committee constituted to look into the matter to submit its report at the earliest. Singh also said UPSC should consider postponing the date of the exam. “We would write to the UPSC and the committee that has been constituted to submit this report to expedite the process, address their concerns judiciously and sympathetically and not let them (the aspirants) go with a feeling that they have been wronged on account of any bias towards any language… There should be no injustice regarding the language and the government does not support this,†the minister said.