Tests and protests

It is the ticket to the so-called steel frame, a career of power and prestige: the IAS. But the civil services aptitude test, part of the preliminary examination, has thrown open a class and geographical divide - aspirants from the Hindu belt fear being outshone by the English-speaking 'elite' in the test. The last word has not yet been said on this struggle.

If the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT), part of the Civil Services preliminary examination make many aspirants apprehensive, an evident push for Hindi since the Modi government took over has turned the debate into a language row, which had been more or less settled in the five decades since it flared up.

What was essentially apprehension about the advantage Engineering and Management graduates had over those from a Humanities background in cracking CSAT has been compounded by poor translation into Hindi of these questions by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the failure to address this problem in the years since the prelims format was changed in 2011 to give more emphasis to aptitude.

Even now, nearly a week after the government took the view that the marks obtained in the English comprehension skills component of CSAT should not be used for merit or gradation purposes while calculating the prelims results, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has not spoken on whether it will factor in this opinion and how it will be implemented. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that in the first CSAT in 2011, the UPSC set a cut-off in the English component of the paper as a qualifier, and the commission’s silence on this front this time round is not helping matters at all.

CSAT tests comprehension, interpersonal communication skills, logical reasoning and analytical ability, decision-making and problem-solving, general mental ability, basic numeracy, data interpretation and data sufficiency, besides English comprehension skills (all of class X level). This paper replaced the objective-type “optional subject”, which along with the test on General Studies, in which aptitude questions were a component, constituted the prelims for over three decades.

Protesting students like Vikas Kumar allege that there has been a sharp drop in the number of students who opt for languages other than English to take the main examination since the introduction of CSAT. “This means that those from the regional language medium are just not getting through the prelims,” he said.

Referring to the number of candidates who took the main examination in other languages in the Civil Services Examination of 2013, he said only 26 appeared in Hindi and a total of 54 in all languages other than English. “Pre-CSAT, it was 50:50,” said the young man who has made six attempts at the prelims and three at the mains. Of his six prelims, two were in the CSAT era, both of which he failed.

Now that the English component has been removed, the agitating students’ demand is that the prelims be postponed by a month to make up for the time spent in protests. While they want CSAT to be scrapped, an alternative goalpost they have set is to make this a qualifying paper and use General Studies only for merit. Any candidate who gets 30 per cent marks in CSAT should be deemed as qualified and the General Studies scores should be used for deciding the merit list.

While the government’s opinion on doing away with the English component of CSAT has gone down well with the Hindi belt students, may others feel a tad short-changed as the English questions accounting for 22.5 per cent marks were their sure shot in the paper.

In making this recommendation, the government, says Rajya Sabha member J.D. Seelam, went by the point raised by Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti convener Dinanath Batra in his petition against CSAT in 2010. Stating that the English component put those from the regional language medium at a disadvantage, he wanted it to be removed from CSAT. The Delhi High Court asked the government to set up a committee to look into the matter. The government purportedly firmed up its mind on doing away with the English component after consulting with this committee and the UPSC.

Stating that Hindi had become a slave to the English “queen”, Mr. Batra, who has been the general secretary of Vidya Bharati, a network of schools run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has gone on record to claim that “We think that we have been behind the motivation of this struggle.” He said he had met Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh on the CSAT issue in July and flagged points from his petition to him.

The former Union Minister and educationist Y.K. Alagh, who had headed the committee which recommended CSAT in 2001, has alleged that the protests were being spearheaded by coaching institutions. However, Jojo Mathews, a founder director of Alternative Learning Systems, a coaching institution with several centres across the capital, says there has been no spike in demand for prelims coaching post-CSAT.

Mr. Mathews, as many others, insists that the paper is not tough. “CSAT can be cracked by students from a Humanities background with some practice,” he says.

Now the government has accepted the “force” in the argument that aspirants should be allowed to take the examination in all languages included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. The fact is that while the question papers are in English and Hindi for the prelims and the mains, the answers for the latter, except the mandatory English paper, can be written in any Eighth Schedule language and the prelims are anyway objective-type papers where answers have to be only marked out.