Plea for UPSC papers in all languages

Chennai: Civil service aspirants in the state have appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to consider their plea to provide exam question papers in all the languages that come under schedule eight of the Constitution to ensure equality.

They also demanded the government to release 200 odd civil service aspirants arrested in New Delhi on Friday while marching towards Parliament. “We are not demanding primary status to Tamil language alone; we are neither opposing Hindi nor English. Our plea is for equal status to all regional languages,” said a release from the Chennai-based UPSC Civil Service Exam Aspirants Forum.

For the preliminary and mains exams conducted by the UPSC, the question papers are being set only in English and Hindi. “Out of for 400 marks in preliminary exam, Hindi translation is given for almost 380 marks. Merely for 20 marks, questions are set exclusively in English. This favours the Hindi speaking belt aspirants,” the forum members complained and further point to the difficulty faced by non-Hindi speaking candidates.

Meanwhile, Delhi based Hindi speaking aspirants have been demanding the UPSC to provide Hindi translation even for that 20 marks in the preliminary exam. In the wake of this agitation in Delhi, Mr Jitendira Singh, Union minister of state, Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) had formed a committee headed by former DoPT secretary Mr Arvind Verma to look into the language row.

“We demand the UPSC and Centre to include all the languages in schedule eight of the Constitution in setting the question papers,” the Chennai forum said in their letter sent to Narendra Modi, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa and Mr Jitendira Singh.