Daily Times

There are over two hundred odd people sitting in front of Karachi Press Club for the last six days. Their story is disturbing.

For the Sindh Public Service Commission (SPSC) exams held in 2013, basic screening was conducted in 2014 for eight subjects wherein 28,000 candidates competed with only 3,300 candidates passing. Afterwards, in the written examination, 664 candidates passed who eventually appeared for interviews. In August 2016, it was announced that 227 candidates cleared the exam process.

Subsequently, the Sindh government issued offer letters to all 227 successful candidates, who accepted the offer with most of them quitting their existing jobs. In an unexpected turn of events, the Supreme Court (SC) took suomoto notice of their recruitment and restrained the appointments, on the application of Advocate Junaid Faruqi of the Sindh High Court (SHC).

It is just a peripheral fact that the same members of the SPSC made recommendations of other 2,000 candidates and cleared 6,000 doctors in another test. But axe had decided to only fall on the 227 candidates, after a four years’ ordeal. It is also pertinent to mention that advocate Faruqui is the counsel for plaintiffs in a constitutional petition filed in SHC regarding the 2013 civil service exams, which these plaintiffs had failed.

Another important observation is that majority of these 227 people who passed the lengthy examination and screening process belong to the lower and middle class sections. They have been protesting ever since and beseeching the learned court to review the verdict given by a three-member Supreme Court bench comprising Justice Amir Hani Muslim, Justice Qazi Faez Isa and Justice Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhel.

The 34-page verdict written by the SC bench reveals that the honourable court was misinformed on certain matters. There were a few documents that neither the SPSC nor the Sindh government could present before the learned bench despite given directions. In the absence of these documents, the learned bench, last month, announced a verdict to cancel the results owing to irregularities and discrepancies.

In Section 23(a) of the verdict, first discrepancy is identified as, ‘Written tests were conducted in April 2015 and results were announced almost a year later, in March 2016’. It may be noted that for 2008-09 exams, the results were announced in April 2010–two years after the exams.

Another discrepancy recorded in Section 23(b) of the verdict states, ‘Those who did remarkably well in the written tests got [SIC] very high marks in the written tests got very low marks in the interview therefore were excluded’. It goes on, “Those who barely passed in [SIC] the written tests got very high marks in the interview, therefore, were included’. Surprisingly, the verdict doesn’t mention the number of candidates who got high marks in written test but failed in interview.

The commission, hence, failed to inform the learned bench that written tests and interviews are entirely two diverging categories of evaluation. It is normal for people who score high in written tests failing the interviews. This can be ascertained by looking at the results of Competitive Superior Services (CSS) exams every year. How this can be attributed as an ‘illegality’ or ‘discrepancy’, only God knows.

In the next point, the verdict says: ‘250 marks were allocated for the interview part of the CCE 2013, but no disclosure was made about marks allocated to each of the three interviewers nor the marks respectively awarded by them’. It might have been instructive if the commission had submitted details of all other examinations with duality of evaluation into written and interview tests. The bench would have hardly found another exam, including past examinations. Then why not order the commission to change the marking pattern instead of punishing candidates?

The next ‘discrepancy’ that the verdict identifies states: ‘Two of the three members who conducted the interviews, admittedly, were not qualified to be Members of the Commission’. Well, if that is the case, then where does the legality of all other exams stand that the commission conducted in the same period? For example, written tests conducted in 2015 for doctors. Not only that 6,000 of the candidates who appeared in those exams have been deemed successful but also that Sindh’s chief minister has recently decided to even issue offer letters to them without interviews.

The next paragraph about another ‘illegality and discrepancy’ says, ‘250 complaints were received by the Commission’. SPSC failed to mention before the honourable court that when children of influential people, who had failed the tests, approached the commission, it invited them to redress their grievances.

One could go on and on about every point that the verdict characterises as ‘illegalities and discrepancies’. It is vital to note that some candidates who failed the 2013 exams were from influential families, including that of former chief minister, Qaim Ali Shah. The majority of those who passed the exams were ambitious young people having no access to the power corridors.

The honourable court could rectify this by constituting a review bench, and look for real culprits behind the ‘illegality’, instead of punishing the educated middle class. Mediocrity, your honours, joins hands to prevail, while talent goes on hunger strike.

Justice must be served to these brilliant minds who were forced to protest a decision imposed upon them.

The writer is a staff member and can be emailed at marvisirmed@gmail.com and accessed on Twitter @marvisirmed