A group of civil service aspirants staged a demonstration outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence at Race Course road in Delhi, demanding changes in the structure of preliminary Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT).
The protestors argued that the structure of the exam is such that only engineers can pass it. They also said that the percentage of students from Hindi medium students have dipped drastically over the year after the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) introduced a new screening test for civil services ‘mains examination’.
Kulbhushan Mishra, an aspiring IAS said, ‘Only 2 per cent of Hindi students have passed civil services exams this year, while earlier it was over 10 per cent’. Out of the total number of people selected for civil services this year, only 26 are from Hindi-medium background.
‘The screening test is tailor made for so-called technocrats coming out of elite institutions like IITs and IIMs,’ said Mishra who had qualified to the interview round twice before CSAT was introduced in 2011.
They also said that CSAT is getting too technical for people from smaller towns. ‘The translation in CSAT is done via Google translator due to which the exact meaning is lost. Google translates every word in literal sense. For someone, whose first language is other than English, they cannot even understand the question leave alone answering it’, Mishra added.
Venkaiah Naidu, union minister of urban development, whose vehicle was also stopped by agitators, said, ‘our government is serious about vernacular languages. We will take it up in the cabinet meeting today.