S Kumar
Three IAS seats may look small in the total of 1099 finally selected candidates but let’s look at statistics to understand how big 3 IAS seats are.
A total of about 11 Lac candidates applied for the UPSC Civil Services 2016 examination and finally, 1099 successful candidates were selected. Every applicant applying for Civil Services exam dreams of becoming an IAS, which has only 150 seats and among those 150 seats only 90 seats are general category open seats. So, we are talking about 3 seats from 11 lac applicants and 90 general category open seats within 150 total IAS seats. That is 2% of total IAS seats and above 3% of all open category IAS seats. The readers can understand the importance of 3 seats among 1099 considering that a significant number of successful candidates not getting IAS during allocation process decide to write the Civil Service examination again the following year to get the coveted IAS.
During this examination, three SC candidates were among the top 90 candidates in the written results. However, none of them possibly can get among the open category IAS seats, just because they were given such low interview marks that they can get IAS seat only within the reserved category seats, and thus leaving the seats for upper castes in the open category.
The top 3 SC candidates based on the written results are following:
The above details do not provide the complete insight of the conspiracy. Let’s look at more details of how these 3 fared among other candidates.
Following table provides details of the numbers received by other candidates.
It comes out that the 3 SC candidates who fared so well in the written exam could not get even decent marks in the interview process. The conspiracy becomes more apparent when we look into the top 10 SC candidates who fared well in the written exam, they too faced a similar problem. The top SC students were not just given below average marks as compared to the Top 100 (written) candidates and Top 100 (written) General candidates and but top SC candidates also received below average marks as compared to all SC candidates, and all 1099 qualified candidates. The difference in marks is not just by few points but more than 10 points.
This is a serious case of manipulation of marks by the discretionary power given to the interview process and it is especially used to eliminate the competition coming from the best candidates from reserved category students. This manipulation seems to suggest that UPSC wants to reserve the open category seats for upper caste candidates only.
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S Kumar is an Engineering and Management graduate from top institutes.
