A protest was staged outside the residence of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh by members of the National Students' Union of India (NSUI) over the ongoing UPSC row here on Saturday.
Mohit Sharma, a protester, belonging to the NSUI, told ANI, "Common students are not being allowed to protest. Were these the good days that were promised by the government? Don't we have a right to agitate? Students are demanding changes in the CSAT and want the exam date to be postponed from August 24."
"We have a right to protest, we are the citizens of this nation," he added.
Meanwhile, Congress leader Manish Tewari told ANI, "The government has absolutely failed the students. Their handling of the situation has been inept. The government, over the past two months, has played football with the careers and lives of millions of students."
Minister of State (MoS) in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) Dr. Jitendra Singh, however, had said Friday that the Verma Committee report on changes to be made in the pattern of conducting civil service examinations is with the government, which in turn, will give a final decision on it in a couple of days.
Singh said, "Now that the report has come, the government will plan and act accordingly. From your medium, I want to assure that the decision will be well thought out and a balanced one."
UPSC aspirants have been protesting vociferously against the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) examination, which was introduced in 2011, demanding that it be made easy for rural students.
Till 2010, the UPSC had two papers - one on general studies and one on an optional subject, where aspirants could choose one of the 23 listed subjects. Changing the syllabus from 2011, the UPSC replaced the optional subject paper with a paper that tests the aspirants' aptitude-CSAT.
The second paper in the preliminary exam comprises comprehension, interpersonal skills including communication skills, logical reasoning and analytical ability, decision making and problem solving, general mental ability, basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude, etc - Class X level).
The syllabus also has data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency, etc - Class X level) and English language comprehension skills (Class X level).
Aspirants are having problems with the CSAT syllabus, as they feel it favours those who are from the science stream or, more specifically, from an engineering background.
They have also claimed that CSAT is discriminatory against students from the humanities stream, particularly those who have studied in Hindi.
The protesters believe that the English language comprehension skills, which the second paper tests, are discriminatory against students from a Hindi-medium background.
The protesters have also raised their voice against the use of the Google Translator for translating CSAT questions from English to Hindi, which they termed as a disastrous experiment.
