Editor,
With the APPSC exams round the corner, the demand for an exam calendar is growing louder, and rightly so. In the recent Assembly session, Chief Minister Pema Khandu stated that there is a deficit of 106 circle officers in the state. If we add up the vacancies in the allied services, the number of vacancies should further increase.
It is a new start for the commission and I think it’s the right time for the APPSC to streamline the civil services exam, so as to conduct it every year.
Rather than advertising the vacancies all at once, I would suggest that the commission fill up the existing vacancies spread equally over a period of three years, with exams conducted annually. By the end of three years, some of the current employees would have retired, providing for new vacancies, thereby establishing a cycle for the exams to be conducted every year.
In the last few years, we have witnessed a steady rise in the retirement of earlier batches of government employees. From hereon, employees going into retirement will be a continuous process. The APPSC can easily work on this data to project vacancies for exams to be held in the future. If the numbers show more than 20 vacant posts on an annual basis, then holding exams every year will be more prudent than letting the vacancies accumulate, citing cost of conducting exams.
Previously, a candidate could attempt the civil services exams a maximum of five times in his/her lifetime, given the APPSC’s unpredictable ways of advertising vacancies anywhere between two to five years. Some older readers might lament that they only had three or four attempts before their disqualification by age.
If the exams are to be held annually, every candidate will have had at least five attempts by the time they turn 30. That many attempts should be sufficient for any candidate to figure out where they stand in the competition and decide whether to hang in there or look for other pastures career-wise. To be able to make this decision at 30, before it is too late, would be a boon for a lot of candidates.
It does matter to the candidates to know if the APPSC will hold exams or not in the coming year. The onus is on the commission to design an annual exam calendar with tentative dates to help the candidates out.
A citizen,
Itanagar