APPSC interviews for Group-I Services from today

Results by first week of July, says official

The Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission (APPSC) will conduct the oral test (interviews) for the candidates who qualified the Group-I Services Mains examinations, from June 15 (Wednesday) amid raging controversy over “irregularities” in the conduct of the exam and selection of the candidates.

Deviating from the earlier practice, the Commission has constituted three Boards comprising members of the Commission, all-India service officers and subject experts to ensure transparency and accountability. “We want to wind up the process in two weeks and announce the results by the first week of July,” said an official from the Commission, which is contemplating reforms to make the whole exercise of conducting examinations and selection of meritorious candidates transparent.

The official said internal reforms were already under way and as part of it, a capacity-building exercise had been taken up. The Commission also intends to start the process of department-wise and post-wise recruitment for 292 vacant posts in the categories of Group-I (110) and Group-II (182) posts.

In a GO (No. 78) issued on March 31, the government directed the heads of the administrative departments to furnish details of vacant posts, roaster points and qualifications to the Commission immediately.

Steeped in controversy on various counts, the Commission has been accused of remaining indifferent to the woes of the candidates who wrote their preliminary examinations in Telugu and claim that they lost valuable marks due to glaring mistakes in translation of the question paper from English to Telugu.

The wide gap between the list of qualified candidates in the digitally evaluated answer sheets and the manually corrected papers has become yet another point of debate.

A litigation led to a High Court direction to the Commission to set aside the results announced through digital evaluation of the answer sheets and take up manual correction of the answer sheets. “”After wasting huge public money, the Commission took up manual evaluation of the papers in February in violation of the court order to complete the exercise within three months,” said Krishna Mohan, an aggrieved candidate who cleared the “digital” exam but found his name missing in the second round of manually correction of the answer sheets.

Alleging that the Telugu medium answer sheets were evaluated by English medium examiners, he said while the ‘digital’ evaluation was handled by professors of premium institutions like IITs and IIMs, the same was not the case with the manual correction.