Onus on newly recruited civil servants to realise vision of new India: Jitendra Singh
Union Minister Jitendra Singh said, on Tuesday, June 7, that recently recruited civil servants must become active partners in realising Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of a new India that leads the rest of the globe. He said that when the country celebrates 'Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav' to mark the 75th year of India's independence, "this century batch with 25 to 30 years of active service ahead will chart a new course when independent India turns 100," while interacting with the top 20 rank holders of the civil services examination 2021, the results of which were announced on May 30. According to the minister, it will be their responsibility to become active partners in realising Prime Minister Modi's vision of a new India that leads the rest of the globe.
According to Singh, the Minister of State for Personnel, India is already on the rise under Prime Minister Modi and civil servants of this new genre have the privileged task of leading it to the top of the global league. According to a PTI report, the minister also stated that candidates who attended Kendriya Vidyalaya, Navodaya School and government schools are succeeding in the exam, while earlier it was mostly confined to students from elite schools.
After joining the government in 2014, Singh said that he started a new tradition at the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) of personally calling all-India toppers to North Block and felicitating them. In response to some toppers' suggestions that Indian language students face difficulties and challenges in taking the exam, he stated that the government is committed to promoting Indian languages and that efforts are underway to have engineering and medical books translated into Indian languages by professionals. Singh informed the officers that some of the issues will be addressed in the National Education Policy.
The minister also stated that the Department of Personnel and Training's National Recruitment Agency (NRA) is preparing to conduct a computer-based online Common Eligibility Test (CET) for non-gazetted government positions before the end of the year. He went on to say that the test will be conducted in 12 languages at first and that it will gradually expand to include all of the languages listed in the Constitution's 8th schedule.
The minister remarked that among the 20 toppers are 10 engineers and 2 medicos, and hoped that they would contribute value to the task allocated to them in carrying out many specialised plans and programmes implemented by the Modi government over the last eight years. Singh expected that the technocrats would be able to do justice to the government's highly specialised flagship programmes in areas like health, agriculture, water, environment, industry, education, skills and mobility.
He also mentioned that there are eight female candidates out of the top 20 candidates and claimed that "we are close to gender balance". The minister also noted the recent demographic shift and stated that these candidates represent a pan-India representation, since they came from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Telangana. He believes that this shift in gender and demographics bodes well for India's diversified population.
Among the first 20 civil services toppers invited by Singh, the first three toppers this year Shruti Sharma (first), Ankita Agarwal (second) and Gamini Singla (third) happen to be women, followed in that order by Aishwarya Verma, Utkarsh Dwivedi, Yaksh Chaudhary, Samyak S Jain, Ishita Rathi, Preetam Kumar, Harkeerat Singh Randhawa, Shubhankar Pratyush Pathak, Yasharth Shekhar, Priyamvada Ashok Mhaddalkar, Abhinav J Jain, C Yaswanthkumar Reddy, Anshu Priya, Mehak Jain, Ravi Kumar Sihag, Diksha Joshi and Arpit Chauhan.
