Examinations and Candidates

Examination 1: The examination for post of Deputy Collector is conducted by Maharashtra Public Service Commission on 2^nd to 4^th September, 2012. There was around 6085 candidates appeared for this mains examination. Among them only 150 candidates will be selected after the final round of interview.

Examination 2: The Union Public Service Commission is conducting its flagship Civil Services mains Examination from 5^th October 2012; for top post in Indian Bureaucracy like IAS, IPS. Around 10500 screened candidates will appear for it and eventually 850 will get selected.

Now let us start the debate on real burgeoning questions on these examinations and their patterns, the selection procedures and final outcomes. All major newspaper will have a headline on the day of final results quoting some guy and girl toppled the examination, their preparation strategies and success stories. However no special emphasis is yet made on the candidates who fail to cross the final round. As both of the above examinations are toughest one, at State and National level respectively, requires tremendous efforts. On an average every candidate puts around 2-3 years in the actual preparations. The preparation for these examinations will have itself a bunch of stories, which will be dealt separately. Around 4 lakh students appeared for prelim examination for MPSC and 9 Lakh Students for UPSC. We have 28 state recruiting boards’ in India means at least 80 lakh and Let us assume no one repeats these examinations; so we have 80 lakh eligible candidates having graduate degrees. All these candidate puts minimum 2 years of preparations, simply means we have 26 lakh people engaged annually which should be happier thing for Government. But engaging this 26 lakh people for one year means total annual loss of Rs. 84,240 crore; keeping our average per capita income of 1950 $ of statistical data. So we understood what we are losing while preparation of these examinations.

This is the only one part of story, it has a lot of another shades too. Many aspirants are Highly qualified professionals such as Doctors, Scientists, Engineers. Again the Nation where majority of public works in service sector and need immediate capacity building in areas such as Research and Development, looses many of its professional among these 26 Lakh people. Again there is question of failed candidates among these examinations for employment, skills development as they have invested in preparation of these examinations and this will mostly un-useful in Manufacturing, Infrastructure and other industries as most of syllabus is theoretical and memory based. However the jobs in private firms require hands on practices and technical skill sets.

To understand the seriousness of problem we need to understand the grass root person of these systems. The investment made by the candidates and the success ratio is a need major attention. The examinations needs immediate reforms to have a capacity building nature, that the supplementary post could also get filled through the unsuccessful candidates. Also the other agencies including Various Boards, Government as well as Private Banks, PSU, and Software Firms should collaborate to have different types of single entry examinations reducing the preparation times and increasing the productivity of World’s Largest Democracy.