Excelsior Correspondent
NEW DELHI, May 16: IAS aspirants, student leaders and representatives of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) today called on Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances,Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh at his North Block Office to thank him and felicitate him for the revolutionary decision to change the examination pattern for selection to IAS and allied services. They offered bouquets to the Minister and also shared sweets with him.
Acknowledging the gesture by the young scholars, Dr Jitendra Singh said, Narendra Modi Government is committed to provide “maximum governance with minimum government” and to achieve this objective in true spirit, we need to attract into Civil Services, such youth who not only have calibre but also have an inborn aptitude for administration. It is with this in mind that the decision has been taken to revise the pattern and syllabus of the IAS exam in such a manner as to provide a level playing field to all the aspirants, regardless of their background, rural or urban upbringing, or the stream/subjects studied by them.
Soon after coming to power, Dr Jitendra Singh said, for the very first exam of IAS that took place in the month August 2014, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) took the bold decision of scrapping away the 22 mark English portion in Question Paper No.2 of the Preliminary Exam so that no aspirant would experience disadvantage on account of not having read in an English medium school or college. Time has come when educationists must sit down and devise a selection pattern which enables inclusion into IAS and allied services of such candidates who can live up to the requirements of governance in the 21st century India, he said.
“We have come a long way since the times when a Collector was meant to collect revenue”, said Dr Jitendra Singh and added, “today we need Collectors who can generate revenue for a host of poverty eradication schemes introduced by PM Narendra Modi”. The need of the hour is to have such administrators who could carry forward schemes like “Jan Dhan Yojana” to the poorest of the poor and the remotest of the remote with sensitivity and effectiveness, without getting stuck up in red tapism or dogmatism, he said.
The student leaders who visited Dr Jitendra Singh expressed gratitude and satisfaction at the decision to declare CSAT as qualifying and determine the merit of the Preliminary Examination purely on the basis of marks obtained in the General Studies Paper No.1.
Prominent among the student leaders who felicitated Dr Jitendra Singh were Moolchandra Singh, Saket Bahuguna, Edward Mendhe, Deverndra Singh and Ashish Agnihotri.
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