Madurai youths allege foul play in exam held for postal jobs

Allege that Haryana candidates scored high marks in Tamil proficiency section

A group of youngsters, preparing for competitive examinations, petitioned the Collector’s office here on Thursday raising suspicion of foul play in examination conducted by the Department of Posts to fill 309 Postman and Mail Guard vacancies in its Tamil Nadu Postal Circle.

In the results published online on Tuesday, the youngsters allegedly found that a considerable number of top scorers were from Haryana. Surprisingly the scored unbelievably high marks in the 25-mark section meant for checking one’s Tamil proficiency. The examination conducted in multiple choice format had four sections - General Knowledge, Mathematics, English and Tamil - each having 25 one-mark questions.

Tamil syllabus

The syllabus for Tamil section included compound and complex sentences, proverbs, sentence correction, sentences used in colloquial dialect and grammatical concepts such as ‘punarchi’ and ‘anigal.’ “There is nothing wrong in candidates from other States applying, since all Indian nationals are eligible. However, it is inexplicable how candidates from Haryana could score 24 out of 25 in Tamil,” said one of the petitioners.

They stumbled upon this pattern when they curiously searched the results published in PDF format on the website to find top scorers among the nearly 1.10 lakh candidates who took the exam. “When we found that majority of the top scorers had North Indian names, we keyed in their registration numbers in the option available to find details of candidates. A random check showed almost all were from Haryana but for a few from Maharashtra,” a petitioner said, showing printouts.

“We even called a few of them on their mobile numbers available on the website. No one understood Tamil. They spoke in broken English,” he said.

Option disabled

Interestingly, the option to check details of candidates was disabled from Thursday morning. “Despite completing post graduation, unemployment is forcing us to apply for these jobs that demand just matriculation. If such exams are not conducted in a fair manner, what else can we do?” asked another petitioner.

While the results of all candidates have been released, DoP is yet to publish the list of selected candidates.

The selection will be done based on marks in compliance with vacancies reserved for OBC, SC, ST and other categories.

Alleging that the discrepancies indicated leakage of question papers or other malpractices, the petitioners demanded a thorough inquiry and that the examinations be conducted again.