UPPSC runs out of members to conduct personality tests

ALLAHABAD: Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission (UPPSC) is expected to announce the result of Provincial Civil Services (Mains) Exams-2016 by the last week this month. However, the exam process which also involves interviews and is half-way even after two-years, could be delayed further due to paucity of members to conduct the interviews of over 2,500 candidates.

Commission sources said that five out of eight UPPSC members got retired in the past two months. This would affect the interviews process of PCS (Mains) exams.

Three members - Sunil Jain, Syed Farman Ali and Sanjay Yadav - got retired on June 15, while Anil Gupta's tenure ended on June 20 after a six-year tenure. Apart from them, one of the remaining three members, D C Mishra, will retire on August 31 leaving only two officials, D P Dwivedi and Jairam Prasad, to manage the exams and personality tests of the candidates. As per norms, the term of the UPPSC member is for six years or 62 years, whichever is earlier.

"We will be facing problem in conducting interviews if members are not appointed by month end when PCS-2016 (Mains) exam results are slated to be released. There will be around 2,500 candidates and it is not possible for two members to hold interviews of such a large number of aspirants," said UPPSC secretary Jagdish.

The state government had initiated online selection procedure in April to fill the posts, but is still to complete it. "The recruitment process by the government has been started and we are hoping it will be over by next month," he added.

The PCS-2016 (Prelims), also called the Combined State Upper Subordinate Services (Prelims) Examintion-2016, was conducted on March 20, 2016. The candidates who had qualified the first stage, had given the PCS (Mains) exam between September 20 and October 8 in Lucknow and Allahabad after which they have been awaiting the results.