Hyderabad:
Beaming faces smile at us from the photographs put up on the notice board at Brain Tree, a training institute for civil service aspirants in the Himayatnagar area of Hyderabad.
"At least a few of these faces who made it top ranks in the IAS would not have been here if the new notification by the UPSC had come earlier, '' says Gopal Krishna, founder-director of the Centre.
He says recent changes brought in by the UPSC to the all India civil services exam will be a setback to aspirants, especially those from Andhra Pradesh. Some 15000 students from Andhra Pradesh appear for the UPSC exam every year, of which some 500 make it to the Mains, on an average. One in every five or six of them takes the exam in Telugu.
Social observers say the notification on regional languages is exclusive rather than inclusive as it discriminates against aspirants from rural India who don't have access to English-medium education. It also puts at a distinct disadvantage those from the non-Hindi speaking belt, especially from the south Indian states.
Upto 95 per cent of those sitting for the civil services exam in in Andhra Pradesh are engineers. Most of them have their school education in Telugu but because engineering is deemed to be a degree in English medium, they cannot take the exam in Telugu. Also, because the focus is on getting into a professional medical or engineering college right from school, languages like English are neglected.
"For engineering, English skills are not required. We do very well in technical subjects. But we have a problem as far as expression in English is concerned," says Ramesh, an engineer from rural Mahbubnagar. He has spent the last three years preparing to write in Telugu and now to be told that is not going to be possible has come as a shock.
"My subject knowledge is strong. In English, I will make grammatical mistakes and there is danger of my losing marks. So rural people like me will suffer," he says.