Protests against changes in UPSC syllabus

Students and teachers from a number of leading universities today held a demonstration here protesting changes in syllabus for civil services examination conducted by Union Public Service Commission.
The protesters strongly objected to exclusion of foreign languages mainly Persian and Arabic from the list of optional subject for the mains examination.
"On the one hand, government talks about globalisation, tapping job opportunities in foreign languages and on the other hand foreign languages have been excluded from optional subject list," JNUSU President Akbar Chawdhary said.
The students and teachers held the demonstration outside the UPSC office in Shahjahan road in Central Delhi.

"In Bihar over 1,000 financially backward students appear for the civil services exam choosing Arabic and Persian as optional papers who will be excluded by the UPSC," said Imran, a student from Patna University.
Terming the recent changes as "elitisation of UPSC syllabus", they demanded rollback of the decisions saying they will affect students from rural areas and those from vernacular medium schools.

"The new CSAT (preliminary) format tends to give a disproportionate advantage to students from science, medical and engineering backgrounds while causing disadvantage to those from arts and humanities background," a memorandum addressed to the UPSC Chairman stated.

The protests were attended by students and faculty members from Jamia Milia Islamia, AMU, Patna University, Allahabad University and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
A delegation of representatives from these universities later met UPSC Chairman D P Agrawal and submitted their memorandum of demands.