The CSAT controversy that burst out just
before the preliminary exam of this year was discussed greatly not only by the
Civil Service aspirants and high class people but also by the ordinary citizen
of this country themselves. It is not a wonder since the result of the
prestigious exam will be the bureaucrats, diplomats or senior law enforcement
officers of the country and people are interested to know who are going to
‘rule’ them or ‘control’ them. Well, that’s a joke, but people want best
officers, the most accurate ones for the job, the perfect ones to implement the
public policies; that is for public administration. So the protest of civil
service aspirants at different places and ruckus made by our MP’s at both
houses of parliament on the CSAT issue easily gained public attention. Of
course, we want the best officers, so we should deploy best ways to choose them
from millions. I, certainly don’t know whether the way we following is the best
to choose the topmost bureaucrats but it is a 3 step solid process. So if
somebody, especially CSE aspirants themselves cry foul about the way of
selection then it is concerning.
UPSC, a constitutional body conducts
Civil Service exam in India which takes almost 1 year long selection procedures
each time. Lakhs of candidates takes part in Preliminary exam in which just
above 10000 select for Mains exam and around 2000 filtered to face interview
board. After interview nearly 1000 young bureaucrats emerges out as victorious
then they go for the training sessions of their allotted posts (IAS, IFS, IPS,
IRS etc). But this year there was great protests against the conduct of
preliminary exam just weeks before the date of exam. The protest was against
the syllabus of General Studies paper II (Civil Service Aptitude Test, CSAT).
Let me remind you one thing, in past three years that is 2011,2012 and 2013
UPSC conducted the prelims with the same syllabus which was introduced in 2011.
The main complaint was that the CSAT paper is helping non Hindi candidates very
much and biased towards technical background students. The students from the
rural and humanities background find this as a blow to their hopes and feared
an early exit from the competition. Let’s see what exactly in the bomb shell.
The CSAT paper has 80 questions including
arithmetic ability, decision making, logical reasoning, analytical ability,
mental ability, data interpretation, English comprehension etc. Well, I’m a
student belong to rural area, not English medium, and pure science during
graduation does not find any of the above as a herculean task to anyone, at
least considering this is asking in such a prestigious exam where a country is
searching for intelligent and capable minds to handle the ‘infrastructure’ or
backbone of the country (public administration, law & order, diplomacy
etc). Logic, reasoning or power to decision making is needed by bureaucrats
than anybody. Everybody has logics and power to reason, so to answer such
questions one needed to be preoccupied for such questions. One need a little
bit practice to answer any kind of such questions than a technical or
management background.
The other issue raised was felt to
me like a big one; which accused candidates of some regions for enjoying some
advantages over Hindi speaking candidates due to the presence of some English
comprehension questions. Well, let’s do the postmortem of question paper, and
I’m taking the CSAT question of 2013 here. It had 80questions, out of which 48
were leaning towards mathematics range; problem solving, mental ability,
decision making, logical reasoning etc. All these 48 questions had Hindi
versions too (that is questions were in English at the left and in Hindi at the
right side of the page). Other part has 12 passages and 32 questions from the
passages to answer. Of these 12 passages three small passages at the end had no
translations in Hindi that is this three were the actual English
comprehensions. These 3 passages had 8 questions to answer and other 9 passages
which had Hindi translations got 24 questions to answer. The main allegation
was about these 3 passages that they are hard for students from rural areas and
Hindi speaking candidates and they questioned the need of English
comprehensions. “We could well communicate with our regional languages. So why
do we need English? The candidates opt
IFS should be well versed in English, but that does not needed by the
bureaucrats of our country” their arguments were something like this.
Well, I felt all these
arguments a lot childish. First the preliminary exam is an objective one, there
is no need to answer or explain any views in English. When a candidate has to
elaborate their answers that is in the mains exam or communicate their views
that is in the interview, they are allowed to opt the language of their choice.
In prelims UPSC wants to know whether the candidate is eligible to read and understand
a simple passage with 10th standard difficulty (that’s maximum) in
English. If UPSC put that as criteria for the selection of officers it can’t be
blamed. We need officers who can read and understand at least a notice in
English. The ‘Protect and support our mother tongues’ campaign should have
nothing to do with English; a language is not the enemy of other language,
people use it defectively is. So if really want to support and spread our
languages world widely we need to communicate with a wide range of people and
we need English, not only for that but for raising our own standards. I don’t
understand how someone can be considering oneself perfect for this topmost job
when he/she got a problem with such a simple thing. They are never asked to perform
their job in foreign language or never demanded to be fluent in English, are
just asked to have the ability to understand English. Now, why is it English?
Well, I think it is because of the reign of British in India years back, our
education system has great influence by them; the one language or subject that
taught in almost all part of India is English. And English is a global language
that could connect all the regions of India as well as India with the world, at
least I think so. An IAS/IPS/IRS officer can never stick with their regional
language or mother tongue during their tenure as officers; they are the
officers of a country with multitude of languages in use. They need to
communicate with people efficiently wherever they go, so language can’t be a
barrier. Then why is this strike against English when they are going to learn
many languages during their journey. The protesters only need to spend the time
with English than in protests, at least in the coming years.
Now just have a look at the ‘advantage’
part. Some accused the candidates from the ‘C’ region that is non Hindi region
have an advantage over others due to the syllabus that embrace English. Why?
Are their forefathers British or American, so they have proficiency in English?
I’m from Kerala; I don’t think I can tell about the feeling of the whole non
Hindi region as I barely have an idea about the people and conditions. So here
is what I feel as a keralite about this issue. In Kerala also children go to
school state government, CBSE or ICSE syllabus mainly like other part of the
country. It can be English medium or Malayalam (our mother tongue) medium. While
English medium teach all subjects in English Malayalam medium has English as a
language to study. All part of our country follows this pattern, classes in
their regional language or English, but all has English as a subject to study. So
how will there be an advantage for Kerala (or non Hindi) candidates over English
language? Their mother tongue is not English. They also study English as a
language during their primary education system like any other students. They do
only have the acquired knowledge of English not inherited. So, advantage to
them? Really! Let’s see the whole plot.
As I said earlier the whole question
paper had questions in both Hindi and English, not any other language. The Hindi
speaking candidates get 72 out of 80 questions in Hindi. And of course other 8
questions can’t be in Hindi as they are English comprehension questions. Now what
about the other non Hindi candidates, they don’t have an option! They too get
the same question paper; English and Hindi versions only. So who do have the
real advantage? Let’s just keep aside civil Service exam for some time, and
have a look at other competitive exams, whatever it is, the central government,
semi central government or bank, have you ever heard about questions in
regional languages other than Hindi? All
exams in India for such jobs take place in English medium and the questions
with a Hindi version too, not in any other languages. I have never seen a Malayalam
question paper for exams conducted for the post of bank clerk, bank probationary
officer, insurance company vacancies or even SSC conducted exams for central
government jobs. But I had Hindi version along with English. This has been
happening for years and candidates of the non Hindi are so accustomed to this
system that they never think of the language. What to think of, they don’t have
an option anyway. It is obvious people from places like Kerala always go with English,
a better known language to them than Hindi. The people who ruled India after
the British for years (until today) never had a thought about the non Hindi
speaking people (job seekers; in this case). So when the English left the
country they remembered to make the changes favourable for some people (exactly
speaking, North Indians) but not for the entire country. They added a Hindi
version question paper along with English, but completely forget about the non Hindi
speakers. And what people like keralites did was, they mastered enough English to
answer such questions. It would be difficult, but people did it, they are doing
it. For them the questions are in English, they are not worried about the
option they never had. Actually they converted the disadvantage to their
advantage. Now if they have such an advantage then they worked for it and acquired
it, not begged for it. The fun fact is that even the exams conducted by Kerala
PSC (Public Service Commission) for many state government jobs have 10% English
questions including vocabulary and grammar and most of the question papers (for
posts need qualification above 10th standard) are in English (yeah, only
in English). The language for administration in Kerala is Malayalam and still
nobody protest against English question papers and questions. Why should us,
knowing others' doesn’t mean to forget our own legacy.
The protests against English comprehension by civil service aspirants at
different places and the follow ups (UPSC omitted the comprehension part in
2014 prelims) infuriated some candidates (okay, read from Kerala). A lot of
candidates around the country complained that creating such a fuss when the
exams are at the corner was unnecessary. And the government decision to exclude
some questions created confusions among candidates too. All the fuss was about
discrimination of some against the other. Well, we saw who is actually discriminated
and how. Even if there was a case of discrimination it should be discussed a
lot before. The whole syllabus changed before 2011 prelims, then why was such a
huge agitation just before 2014 exam. If such a complaint was there why that
voices never heard before. And quite amusingly the MP’s of the party raised the
voice first in the parliament were the ruling party till 2 months before the
whole event. What were they doing when they were in power if they knew there is
something wrong with the pattern of exam? And just to calm down all this, the
ongoing government deleted some questions; problem solved! Well, I don’t think
the problems are solved, not yet. There is an English language paper in Civil
Service mains exam even though it is qualifying in nature. Aspirants who
protested against the 3 simple passages will never be happy about the 300 marks
qualifying paper. Let’s see what happens. I don’t think selection of topmost
officers of the country should fall to some political agenda. If aspirants have
issues with the pattern of exam that has to be solved but it should not be at
the expense of quality of the exam. We can’t
downgrade the standard of exam. In case of the demand of question papers in
regional languages it is reasonable. It is not justifying asking some candidates
to opt from two outside languages when some other candidates have the luxury of
questions in their mother tongue. If Hindi translations are allowed then the
demand for regional language versions can’t be neglected. And if government
decided to go for English only to maintain equality (it is the right decision
for me, but will only be labeled as utopian thinking) then a lot of people will
cry foul against the advantage for Nagaland candidates. Well, it will be better,
at least that time (than the English advantage of keralites) as some of
Nagaland people proclaim English as their mother tongue.
The result of whole Civil
Service exam is the administrative power of our country. We want high standard
there. Well, will English bring standard there? I don’t think so, but elimination
of English as a language is not possible there. We want to keep our standards
high; we believe in progressive movements, wide growth, expansions, we can’t
compromise with something that in anyway delimiting our abilities. Language
barriers should not limit our resources for achievements whether it is in
physical development of the country or the knowledge level of people. English as
a language help us to open new windows of knowledge and development. We should
accept that. The bureaucrats or diplomats of our country are facing and
tackling challenges every day. They are trained for that. The Civil Service
aspirant’s ultimate aim should not be to clear the exam; it should be to become
the best public administrator. If they have a problem with the simple
reasonable criteria of their selection, then how can they be eligible officers?
The politicians of our country treat people as vote banks. They make noise
especially when issues like religion, region, castes, languages etc arises. It will
be better if candidates stay away from such divisive political policies. I don’t
know what ‘politics’ is our parties playing on the syllabus controversy. If they
are really concerned they should find a reasonable unanimous solution and the
government should implement it. If UPSC wants some criteria for the selection
of candidates and wants to maintain the standard of the exam then it should explicitly
state it. An intelligent and right decision should be taken to avoid further
problems in this matter. It should not be favouring anyone or discriminating
others, purely a logical reasonable one.
