By Akhil Bansal : It was the last year of my college when I decided to go for the Civil Services Examination and finally after finishing up my degrees, I sat for the Preliminary part of CSE-2012 on May 20th, the result of which came out on July 25th, qualifying which I appeared in the Mains Examination in October and now awaiting result which will, expectedly, be out in nigh March next year and if then qualified, the ‘final waiting’ will end in May. So, from May-2012 to May-2013, I am busy preparing, attempting and waiting-cum-preparing for the next year, a schedule followed by many candidates. In the meantime(May-May), there was another development for me, which I want to share. The PPSC (Punjab Public Service Commission) hibernated for nearly a decade, with respect to PSCSCCE, the ‘state form’ of UPSC-CSE and then awakened to undertake an exam in 2010 and now in 2012. The preliminary exam date for it was November 25th, answer key for which was published on November 27th and further grievances of candidates or lapses in the exam were taken into account to publish the ‘corrigendum’ and the ‘combined mark list’ displaying the marks of candidates in a highly transparent manner on December 7th and the final result was published on December 11th (http://www.ppsc.gov.in). So, just about two weeks from the exam to the result. Further the process followed by PPSC for conducting Mains and interview is planned to be expeditious than UPSC.
UPSC is undertaking reforms in its CSE from the last couple of years, therefore the change in pattern of the Preliminary exam and further anticipation about change in Mains pattern by students is widespread. But among these ‘major’ changes, reforms regarding time interval of the conduct of exam, grievance redressal of candidates and transparency are lost somewhere, they may seem trivial, but they are as important as the former ones.
The time interval
UPSC conducts the CSE , starting from the Preliminary date to the final result, in approximately an year. There are multiple issues involved with this year long(May-May) style of exam. Firstly, it raises the question, why UPSC, even after introduction of OMR sheets and technology based evaluation, takes more than 2 months (May 20th –July 25th) to give out the result. The immediate case is the above mentioned one, where PPSC finished the process in about two weeks. Though, one may claim that UPSC deals with close to 2.5 lakh copies, where PPSC deals with a far less 30,000-40,000, but with the use of technology, this argument doesn’t account for the long difference in both the time frames. Further, there is no sufficing argument put forward by UPSC of what happens with the Mains copies for 4 months, considering the development in transportation infrastructure and ancillary technologies like softwares, for say, scaling, if it happens, which can sift through data regarding thousands of candidates’ marks.
But beyond these infrastructural issues, there are problems which this long time interval begets. Most of the candidates are not able to do anything else, which is not related to the exam, in the yearly period, this put the career of many candidates, who are not selected due to low selection ratio, in a fix. More worrying situation comes when this assertion is little twisted, there are people who want to attempt this examination, but they can’t, since they can’t afford to stay out of the job market for such a long duration of time, especially when the examination demands graduation and above, a time when financial obligations befall many. This skews the examination in favour of those who can ‘park’ themselves in the ‘preparation garage’, without any financial burden on them. This makes many among even capable middle class people wary of taking on this exam, leave alone poor people. Hence, this time frame itself narrows down the sample frame of population, from where candidates get selected, whence a non-representative administrative framework.
Opacity of the exam process
Looking at the trees of this forest of UPSC-CSE exam, we can observe that the ‘tree’ of long time frame has common branches with the ‘tree’ of opacity, simply, these issues overlap. The unjustified time taken to conduct the exam has its roots in UPSC’s attitude to ignore any attempts to make it answerable or accountable to the candidates and the society, especially with respect to the exam process. Further, this is the long time frame which makes people guessing and speculating about the ‘opaque processes’ going on in the examination process, for which there is no transparency, whence no accountability and no ‘question’of redressing grievances.
Again, the immediate case here is of PPSC’s PSCSCCE exam, where ‘carbon copied’ answer sheets were allowed to candidates to be taken away by them and the list released on November 7th consisted of marks of both papers, category and the combined merit rank. When this kind of transparency is incorporated in its processes by PPSC, why can’t UPSC follow suit. Further, the ‘corrigendum’ published by PPSC on the same date, mentioning the corrections in answers, can show way to UPSC and other State Public Service Commissions to take this first step towards establishing a grievance redressal mechanism for candidates, a lacking feature which is rife in the whole of our government machinery. I am sure candidates for this exam have a lot of grievances.
All this calls for revamping the Civil Services Examination structure into one which is more transparent, grievance redressing and a narrow time band for conducting the exam, but firstly these issues need to be entered into the domain of discourse on the civil services reform porcess. The need for a thorough examination of these issues gets even more pressing,when the State Public Service Commissions, PPSC in this case, shows the way to UPSC, inverting the ‘traditional following structure’.