Another row over UPSC: Modi govt lowers upper age limit for taking civil service exam

As if the Narendra Modi government’s decision to drop German as an alternative to Sanskrit as a third language in the Kendriya Vidyalayas wasn’t enough, now it is set to take another unpopular decision. The Modi government on Tuesday lowered the upper age limit for Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) aspirants, reported CNN-IBN. According to a government notification, the upper age limit for general category will be 26, down from 30, for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 28 from 33 and for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) categories it will be down to 29 from 35. [caption id=“attachment_1679007” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Protests against the UPSC format. PTI.[/caption] This means earlier while people could try to crack the UPSC exam at least two or three times, they probably won’t be able to now. In the current education system, a person is about 23-24 years old after completing their masters degree, and if they have time only till 26, that’s just two more years – to prepare and crack the exam. This isn’t the first row over the UPSC exams. Earlier, in August, the civil services aspirants called for the scrapping of  CSAT which they felt was biased towards technical and management students and put aspirants from Hindi belt and humanities background at a disadvantage. The Arvind Verma Committee report had argued that the CSAT is a scientifically formed exam and shouldn’t be tinkered with. The committee, however, had recommended that the quality of English to Hindi translation in CSAT paper should be improved. There are 20 marks of English comprehension which are of class 10th level and sources say that future civil servants are expected to have that level of knowledge in English. The government had finally told the parliament that the marks in English language comprehension skills in the CSAT would not be included in preparing the merit list and the exams have been thus made “language neutral”. With inputs from agencies