Over the last three days, lakhs of youth in the country have taken to Twitter to air their anger over the delay in the announcement of exam dates and results for various government exams. The hashtag #SpeakUpForSSCRailwayStudents has been trending with over three million tweets but the conversation is not limited to the conduct of exams or the demand for results to be released - the youth are also questioning the increasing privatisation and the decreasing vacancies in the government sector.
Study IQ, one of the largest platforms that provides online education to candidates aspiring to attempt Indian government exams has been instrumental in running this campaign on Twitter. We spoke to Gaurav Garg, the co-founder and head of Digital Initiatives, Study IQ and asked him why it was important for the youth in the country to come together to run this campaign. Unlike the campaign to postpone NEET, JEE exams that were run by the 12 graders in the country along with support from across the country, these candidates are demanding to be given the opportunity to write their exams. “It is bemusing — they don’t want exams but are being forced to give them. And here, the candidates want to write the exams but the government is refusing to conduct them,” Gaurav says. However, these are not exams that were postponed due to COVID — these aspirants are talking about exams that they’ve been waiting for a year, in some instances longer.
The candidates who attended the Staff Selection Commission’s Common Graduation Level (SSC-CGL) exam that was conducted in 2018-2019 have still not received their results. A total of 50,000 students for only 11,000 vacancies. The dates for the Railway Recruitment Board’s Non-Technical Popular Categories (RRB NTPC) recruitment test have also not been announced and the admit cards have not been released yet, despite the candidates registering as far as March 2019. But this campaign is not just about these exams or results, Gaurav tells us that this has been happening for as long as he can remember — exams get delayed over two-three years or each round happens for over a duration of two years, then the results get delayed as well. So this campaign is years of frustration that is spilling onto social media today.
“We are putting out five million tweets a day. The youth of this country, especially from Tier 3 towns all aspire for government jobs. And for the last few years, the exams are conducted without transparency, with irregularity and it has become very time consuming. Now the exam happens in multiple phases, the preliminary, the main and the interview. For example, if a notification for an exam comes out in 2016, then sometimes the time between these rounds can go on for a duration of 2-3 years and then the joining again takes 2-3 years. So their entire youth pretty much goes into these exams,” Gaurav said. Another complaint that candidates have is that they are forced to pay anything between Rs 500-3000 for some forms and they don’t even get their money back even if the authorities decide to cancel these exams for no rhyme or reason. “Now we’ve also been receiving grievances about similar issues with state exams too, which is why this campaign has become a pan-India movement,” he adds.
Gaurav points out that in the last 5-6 years there the people aspiring for Group B and C jobs have increased, especially since with rising unemployment, engineering students end up applying for these jobs.”We keep saying we are a young country but what are we offering the youth? Recently, 3 crore people applied for 90,000 posts in the railways. So students give their 100 percent to these exams and then when they don’t get through, they think it is their fault and go back to preparing. But what they are demanding is fairness and transparency, so this has become the watershed moment,” the StudyIQ co-founder said.
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