Cancels process at 11th hour ‘to increase number of seats’
GERARD D’SOUZA
[email protected]
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PANJIM: The Goa Public Service Commission (GPSC) has cancelled the selection process for five vacant posts of mamlatdars/ joint mamlatdars and assistant director of civil supplies which was in the final stages of selection.
The posts were advertised in July last year and saw 700-odd applicants of whom 21 were short-listed for personal interviews, after a written exam. Two days prior to the interviews, the candidates received, to their shock, an SMS informing them that the selection had been cancelled.
The decision taken on grounds of “enhancement in the number of vacancies” has left the 21 short-listed candidates ~ who had gone through the grueling selection process right up to the stage of being called for personal interviews ~ high and dry and frustrated that the efforts they had put in to emerge on top from among around 700 applicants for the post have now gone in vain.
In July 2012, the GPSC advertised for five posts of mamlatdars/joint mamlatdars/assistant director of civil supplies, all of which are under the same cadre. Three of these posts were for general category students and two were for reserved categories.
On September 1, 2012 the GPSC released the syllabus for the exam and also announced that the written test will be held at the end of the month on September 30, 2012.
The written test was conducted and of the 700 candidates who had applied, 21 were short-listed for personal interviews in the result published on October 30, 2012.
On November 7, 2012, the short-listed candidates received a call letter asking to come for interviews on November 19. However, three days before the scheduled interview on November 16, 2012, the candidates got a letter saying the interviews had been postponed.
After a brief lull, the GPSC again called the short-listed candidates for interviews through a letter dated March 20, 2013 informing that the new date had been fixed on April 8 and 9.
However, the candidates were in for yet another, bigger shock. Two days before the scheduled dates for the interviews, they received an SMS saying that the entire selection process had been cancelled.
The formal letter announcing the cancellation of the selection process is dated April 9, 2013 the second day originally scheduled for interviews.
When HERALD got in touch with some of the candidates, many of whom are women, they clearly expressed being left dumbfounded that nearly a year of effort had been washed out in a single stroke of the GPSC pen.
“I do not know whether this is a valid reason. If they wanted to fill additional posts, they should have issued a fresh advertisement and initiated a new process for those posts,” one of the candidates who did not wish to be named for obvious reasons told HERALD.
“After all this effort and making it to the list of short-listed candidates, it is scrapped. We are not even sure that for the next selection process we will make it,” the candidate said clearly expressing how victimized the short-listed candidates feel.
The chairman of the Goa Public Service Commission, when contacted, said that the cancellation was on instruction of the government to increase the number of seats available. The government had asked us to increase the number of seats available. So we decided to cancel the process and hold the entire selection process again,” Kurapati Dwarakanath Row who took over as the chairman on March 4 this year told HERALD.
“But we also have to be fair to those who would be applying to the increased number of vacancies,” Row said when asked whether scrapping of the process wasn’t unfair to those who had already applied.
