CSAT row: Ex-UPSC member Vijay Singh says ABVP pressure on government too strong to ignore

NEW DELHI: Calling it an “absolutely retrograde step” in the history of the civil service examinations, former UPSC member and ex-defence secretary Vijay Singh said the government succumbed to the “goons lobby” while saying that marks of the English comprehension paper in the preliminary exam should be excluded for merit or gradation.

Singh, a veteran bureaucrat, was a member of the Union Public Service Commission when the Common Service Aptitude Test (CSAT) was introduced in 2011. Speaking to ET on Monday, Singh said the UPSC had gone into the concerns over the English comprehension exam in great detail before introducing CSAT.

“UPSC was very mindful of the concerns so that no injustice is done…then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh looked at this personally and TKA Nair had called several meetings on the same in the PMO. Former Chairperson of Centre of Indian Languages at JNU, Purushottam Agrawal, who was then a UPSC member, was extensively consulted.

Even then, we did anticipate a problem but a considered decision was taken. But the government now has succumbed to the goons lobby. It is an absolutely retrograde step,” said Singh, who joined the UPSC in 2009 and resigned last year just before his superannuation. Singh said that 10th level English was thought to be a bare minimum necessity.

“UPSC has no Anglo-English hangover. 50% of the aspirants clearing the exam are engineers and doctors. Medicine and engineering are taught across the country only in English,” he said. He also regretted that the lobby of the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the BJP’s youth wing which has been protesting against CSAT, was “too strong” for the present government to stand up to.

Perhaps the root cause of the protests, Singh said, was that the format of CSAT had been changed. “The idea was that too many people qualifying the exam were coaching institute products and the material coming was not up to the mark. So the pattern of the exam was changed to make it easier for intelligent aspirants to clear it rather than products of coaching institutes.

We must remember that the coaching institutes are a big and strong lobby in UP and Bihar,” Singh said. The former UPSC member was also critical of the fact that the government already seemed to have made up its mind about the matter when Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh said a solution would be to the liking of the students and justice would be done.