: More than 200 civil service aspirants staged a protest outside Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) Minister Jitendra Singh’s residence demanding three additional attempts on a temporary basis.

“These attempts are being demanded in lieu of the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) paper, which was introduced in 2011 and has been discriminatory against students coming from rural and regional language background. Aspirants raised slogans against Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and appealed for justice from the DoPT minister and the Prime Minister. They were later detained and taken to Parliament Street police station,” said Aunrag Nigam, convener of UPSC Aspirants Forum.

The aspirants added that after CSAT began, there was a sharp and continuous decline in students coming from rural India and regional languages. “Students coming from Hindi belt clearing the preliminary stage declined from 35 percent to a 12 percent within two years. The government’s own data and Nigvekar Committee report backs these statistics,” they said.

After massive student protests in 2014, CSAT was made a qualifying paper, but students allege that this is incomplete justice. Many student representatives have been meeting government officials for the last six months regarding this issue, but they accused the government of apathy and using stalling tactics.

A group of students, who had come from Gorakhpur, said that when student representatives met the concerned minister he called them “failures”.

“Despite political support, the government seems to be projecting itself as helpless and blaming its inaction on bureaucratic hurdles,” said Deepa, an aspirant from Gorakhpur.