Should government digitize the UPSC and other Govt examinations?

Although the inclination towards working in a corporate is significantly increasing, the love for government jobs or civil services has not yet faded. There are plenty of aspirants who see their future as one of the most respected government officials, IAS officer. The red lights in an officer's car have been banned by the Supreme Court, but there still lies a different kind of feeling, respect, and love for the IAS officer post in a lot of aspirants.

Every year, lakhs of students sit in the 3rd toughest examination of India, that is the UPSC. The UPSC aspirants take up much effort and hard work to crack the deadly examination, however, around 1500 get selected after the rigorous 3 stages. It's not only the reservation which leaves behind many deserving aspirants but also the same old mode of UPSC exam, that is the pen and paper rule.

In the era of digitalization, it's pointless to check the speed and handwriting of the candidates taking the UPSC or  exam, what's more important is to check for their skills to serve the nation better. The students are already well versed from their self preparation or certain IAS coaching online.

The pace with which every corner of our lives is going digitized is one of the biggest reasons why the government should digitize the UPSC and other government exams too. Like, 5 or 6 years from now, there would hardly be any company or office documenting necessary things on paper, rather it would be a computer all equipped with confidential documents and papers, plans and procedures regarding the development of the nation.

The ever-growing digitalization has urged India to have some good government officials in the near future who are capable of working with hand in hand to the digital era. UPSC and other government exams should be conducted in a way that checks the proficiency skills of the aspirants, like the Ms- Office skills (word, PowerPoint, Excel, project, spreadsheets, etc.), Internet and email skills, multimedia, etc.

How would a digitized government exam help?

• Cutting backspace requirements:

The large bundles of answer sheets, need a very safe, secure, and a large space to store them for further correction and processing. For the maintenance of these answer sheets, the government also needs to pay charges to the deployed human resources. This unnecessary space requirement and the expenses to avail it can be cut back with digitized government exams.

• Saving paper and pen:

Buying lakhs of answer sheets for the candidates directly means cutting more than lakhs of trees to make those sheets. The world is going eco-friendly, the Indian government needs to rethink upon the global warming issue and digitize the exams to save paper as much as possible.

• Reducing efforts and time of examiners:

Not every candidate can have a clear and beautiful writing. Many a time, examiners need to screw up their mind to understand what is written. The written answers take greater time to be corrected than the digitized answers which take up hardly 2 mins (with fast internet connectivity) to check one answer sheet.

• Choosing better selection criteria:

The handwriting of the candidates has nothing to do with their competence in serving the nation. The removal of pen and paper exams will also eradicate the vague selection criteria and would give way to select better administrators for the future.

• Speeding up the recruitment process:

Because it takes a very long process to check the answer sheets and to re-evaluate them for transparency, selection procedure gets delayed. Digitized exams can help speed up the process multiple times, and the nation can get the required officers at a proper time. From the current year-long process, the recruitment process can be reduced to months.

• Multiple checking process:

The digitized exams would facilitate multiple checking process, instead of the less reliable one or 2 times checking process. This would even cut out the ambiguities regarding examiner's subjective opinions reflecting in the marks awarded. Biasedness can be completely eradicated.

• Computer literate:

Being computer literate is a real necessity today in governance too. PRAGATI, an e-governance tool works in real time. One who has the proficiency skills can only understand the e-governance tool and work accordingly. The government can recruit competent computer literates only if it digitizes the exams.

• Lesser scope of external involvement and misconduct:

Although UPSC is still considered as a pristine examination, there are other government exams too that have a lot of scope of cheating and misconfigured. A digitized exam, the involvement of technology can eradicate the scope of external involvement and in a way, create some really good, competent administrators for a better tomorrow.

• Effective Time Management:

Time management is important everywhere in our lives, and when it comes to governance, it becomes an even more important thing to be incorporated for better, proper, quicker, the functioning of the government. A digitized exam is also partly based on time management skills, and thus, it can help to recruit the most efficient candidates for the available posts.

To create better administrators for tomorrow, to fill the vacant positions with deserving candidates, to abolish even a single scope of biases and misconduct in the recruitment process, to have a better outlook of India, this revolutionary change is necessary for all the government exams(still unautomated). Yes, the government really needs to look into the positives of the digitized exams and switch over the automated system, leaving behind the traditional pen and paper system.