Infamy written all over it ! MPSC : Wallowing in dirt
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: May 13 2019 -

Infamy is written all over it and there is no doubt about it.

One here is talking about the Manipur Public Service Commission and the examination it conducts to recruit officers to the Manipur Civil Service, Manipur Police Service, Manipur Finance Service, Sub-Deputy Collector and Manipur Secretariat Service.

One here is not only talking about the cancellation of the Preliminary of the Manipur Civil Services Combined Competitive Examination, but the very character of the body which is there to recruit the best brains in the State.

This is about the Civil Services examination and lest one forgets, it was not so long back that the examination conducted to recruit engineering graduates as Assistant Engineers hit the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

And significantly this is not the first time that the examination conducted or to be conducted by the MPSC to recruit the best brains in the State has been reduced to something like a joke.

If memory serves the people right, one may recall that the same Preliminary Examination was also cancelled back in 2008 following some anomalies.

What makes the circumstances that led to the Preliminary examination to be cancelled is just not tolerable.

And such thing can happen only to an irresponsible body like the MPSC.

The seeds of the current impasse may be said to have been sown way back in 2016 when an earlier examination was held to recruit MCS/MPS/MFS officers.

Back then the High Court of Manipur had directed the MPSC to rectify the exam conduct rules and regulations, citing anomalies and it is clear that the directives of the Court were not followed, forcing the cancellation/postponement of the Preliminary examination.

If this is about the failure to frame the exam conduct rules and regulations, then earlier it was about mark tamperings and other wrong doings that dirtied the image of the MPSC no end.

From absence of signatures of examiners in some answer scripts-as was the case in 2016-to down right mark tampering where a candidate who had greased the right palm could have turned his/her score from 15 pc to 75 pc !!!

Such was the case and there is nothing to suggest that things have improved.

Those who are now in their mid age will recall how the then Imphal bench of the Gauhati High Court had to step in and order that some answer scripts be randomly picked and cross checked and how the marks in six or seven answer scripts were found to have been tampered.

This was way back in 1994, when many of the present aspiring candidates would have just been born or would not even have been born.

The TC Das Commission which was formed to probe the matter unearthed more skeletons ultimately forcing the Court to cancel the examination on the reasoning ‘a drop of poison poisons the whole glass of milk.’

Twenty five years down the line and there is nothing much to suggest that things have taken a turn for the better.

Let the whip be cracked and so long as the MPSC is unable to cleanse its stable, let a Central body like the UPSC or the SSC conduct the MCS/MPS examination.

This may just be wishful thinking but this should be taken as an expression of the sense of exasperation and desperation that many genuine candidates would have felt in the face of the examination being cancelled at the nth hour, thereby demonstrating that no corrective measures have been put in place.