The consequences of trivia in the recruitment of new civil servants

That only 32 of the 4,500 candidates who appeared for the examination for the post of assistant secretary of the Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board passed is dismal enough, but the revelation that so many may not have made the cut simply because 23 wrong answers were listed in the key as the correct ones is plain embarrassing.

Those who set that examination paper clearly need closer examination themselves given their apparently poor general knowledge and verification skills even in the age of the all-knowing Google God.

Chalking up a total of 23 mistakes in a paper of 200 questions requires a bewildering degree of incompetence, ignorance and insouciance. However, the unsuccessful examinee who took the matter to court must be thanked for highlighting another equally befuddling facet of the examination: the kind of information that aspirants for an agri-marketing post are supposed to spout.

It is difficult to fathom how knowing who the first Indian winner of the Miss Universe title was or on what day India won its first-ever cricket World Cup or indeed the name of the composer of ‘Vaishnava Jana Toh’ would help a newly minted assistant secretary discharge his or her duties better than those who do not know these crucial trivia. Is it because the underlying ethos may be ‘ Kaun Banega Crorepati’?