Manipur Public Service Commission (MPSC) is set to conduct the Manipur Civil Service combined competitive Exam 22 (Preliminary), after six years, on April 30, 2023 across 40 centres in the state.
However, many candidates may appear the exam for the sake of the examination and have expressed doubts for a clean and fair recruitment.
As per the recently concluded MCSSC Exam 2016 (2022), several lapses and irregularities were found such as two cut-off marks for Scheduled Caste candidates, huge variation in marks obtained among candidates, no appointment of head examiners, no adopting of moderation and scaling, etc.
Further, there are pending cases in the High Court of Manipur against the concluded MCSSC Exam 2016(22) conducted by the MPSC.
Presently, several aspirants have pointed out numerous defects in the rules that provide room for leakages of questions as only two question-setters are going to set questions. They believe that there are chances of question leakage from question-setters themselves, which could be beyond the knowledge of MPSC, and no investigation agency in the world would be able to trace out such malpractices.
It is essential for MPSC to include a greater number of question-setters so as to reduce chances of leakages of questions from the question-setters. Further, there are no such rules for criteria and qualification of question-setters. As per the rules any individual can be a question-setter.
Therefore, relatives of candidates can also set questions and a teacher who runs private coaching centres can also set the questions. It is highly needed for the MPSC to adopt strict rules for selecting question-setters. Also, rules don’t fix any accountability and responsibility for printing and leakage of questions from the printing press. There are still numerous lapses in the rules.
Moreover, MPSC totally disregards the roles and responsibility of supervisors and assistant supervisors/observers. As in the earlier exam of MPSC in the OMR sheet, “no signature of supervisor column” was not provided. It is clearly evident that without the signature of supervisor OMR can be replaced in any of the 40 centres which is to be conducted on April 30.
Considering such defects, many aspirants on social media platform started a campaign “No exam until proper rules” and they also requested to MPSC to postponed the examination for a month after framing the proper rules as they have believed in case, they are selected with defectives rules they may terminated as happen earlier in MCCSCCE 2016 cases as 82 candidates were terminated because of illegalities found in the said exam and they don’t wish to have same fate.
There is no harm in postponing the examination for a month as MPSC postponed the exam many times earlier, even cancelled 2 days before the exam in 2019. It is extremely sad whenever MPSC commits an illegal recruitment, the officials of the MPSC don’t suffer, “it is the Aspirant and the state who are victim” when MPSC commits a wrong. Aspirant only wish is to write a “free and fair examination” with no defects and mistakes, which is unlikely in the upcoming exam.
