HC to hear PIL on Friday against UPSC's decision on Prelims

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Thursday agreed to hear tomorrow a PIL against UPSC's recent decision asking civil services aspirants not to answer questions in the English Comprehensive section of the Preliminary Examination to be held on August 24.

The public interest litigation was mentioned before a bench of justices BD Ahmed and Siddharth Mridul by a civil services aspirant whose earlier individual plea on the same issue was dismissed yesterday by a single judge bench.

The single judge bench had refused to hear the plea saying it was not "maintainable". The court, however, had granted the liberty for filing a PIL on the issue.

"Thousands of students will be adversely affected if the questions of the English Comprehensive section, that carries 22.5, out of 200 marks, will not be checked," Vikas Nigwan, appearing for civil services aspirant Dinesh Bhatia, said.

The court said, "It seems you (lawyer) are fond of running from one court to another. You should have mentioned this before the single judge bench itself and the same petition would have been referred to a larger bench as a PIL."

Recently, the Centre had, following protests by a section of students over English Comprehension test in the Preliminary Examination of the Civil Services examination, decided to remove the questions of English languages in the CSAT.

Later, Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) came out with the decision asking candidates to leave the questions unanswered during the CSAT examination as the section will not have any bearing on the merit list due to non-evaluation.

Dinesh Bhatia, a woman civil services aspirant, had moved the petition against the August 16 notice of UPSC that had said that questions under English Comprehension test category will not be checked.

UPSC had, in its notification, said "the Paper-II would contain a section on English Language Comprehension Skills (Class X Level). Candidates must note that they do not have to answer the questions on this English Language Comprehension Skills (Class X Level) section. These questions will not be evaluated."

The maximum marks for Paper II would be '200 minus the marks earmarked for the English language comprehension skills (Class X level), the UPSC had said.