AAP ridicules govt formula on UPSC row

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today ridiculed the formula proposed by the central government in the UPSC row and termed it as a "cruel joke" on civil services aspirants.
"The government's formula, after so many days of dilly dallying is nothing but a cruel joke on the civil services aspirants, who were subjected to repeated police brutality, only to be finally fooled.
"The BJP government's announcement is only an attempt to distract and kill this movement for reforms in the civil services examination through trivial sops. The spontaneous movement of students had two fundamental points - first, that the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) discriminates against students from the humanities and social sciences background," the party said in a statement.

It added that the nature and weightage of reasoning and quantitative skill related items in the CSAT have a systematic bias in the favour of students with engineering and science background which is why the proportion of engineers and managers in the list of finally selected candidates has shot up in the last three years.
"The government has not addressed the basic objection about linguistic skills being tested only through English.
"It has also not addressed other fundamental objections about privileging English in multiple ways - modern answer paper is only in English, level of qualifying paper in English is much higher than qualifying paper in Indian languages, leading to a clear bias against Indian languages," the statement said.

The party said that the government has conceded one of the small but urgent demands by the students, namely that the students of 2011 batch should be given another chance in 2015, but the equally pressing demand for postponement of the preliminary examination for this year, beginning on August 24, has not been accepted.