With the success rate of Odia students in Union Public Service Commission (UPSC)’s All India Civil Service Examination left much to be desired. The Odisha government has decided to recast the civil service coaching programme run by the higher education department.
It may be recalled here that the higher education department had signed an MoU with a private institute in 2019 to provide qualitative coaching to aspirants from Odisha at subsidized one-time annual fees of Rs 20,650. The candidates whose parents’ annual income was less than Rs 2 lakh were entitled to get enrolled in the coaching programme.
Though the government’s objective was to assist the civil service aspirants who could not afford the exorbitant fees of private institutes elsewhere in the country, the initiative had failed to pay dividends. None of those imparted government-sponsored coaching reportedly cracked the All India Civil Service examination.
The higher education department in a letter to the Chief Resident Commissioner has sought for the list of Odia candidates who cracked the civil service in the past ten years.
“The Higher Education Department does not have the wherewithal to collect this information on its own, Therefore the Chief Resident Commissioner has been requested to get it collected at the earliest”, said the department officials.