L Singsit
Dimapur
The student community welcomed the setting up of Nagaland Staff Selection Board (NSSB) with much happiness. Finally we can now get a proper opportunity to compete for jobs and do away with the rampant backdoor appointments that was an open secret for ages. While this is great news, it still has great disadvantage to the students from Arts stream.
In general, India is a land of engineers and science students. Slowly but surely all competitive exams have been designed in such a way that most of the successful candidates are from Science background. UPSC, NPSC, SSC, Banks or any competitive exams has Maths.
One can understand Arts subjects by hard work and self study but to understand Maths by self study is a much difficult task. As such, in competitive exams the Science students tend to have more speed and edge over the Arts students. For example, data from UPSC shows that most students clearing UPSC Civil Services in recent years had Science background. There are no published data of the educational background of the successful candidates for NPSC Civil Services. But a look at the syllabus and previous years questions paper reveals that there are lots of Maths and Commerce topics in both Prelims and Mains. In fact, NPSC Mains has more Science and Maths topics as compared to UPSC Mains.
Thus, the setting up of NSSB is not a good news for Arts students because the syllabus is in line with SSC; and this give Science and Commerce students the slight edge to get higher marks than the Arts students.
Therefore the Arts students are in a dilemma. We cannot ask for deletion of Maths and Commerce topics from exams but also can't beat them in their subjects in the exam hall.
Since Maths and Commerce topics are also important, one can only advise young students to take Science or Commerce at least till Class 12 if they want to get jobs through competitive exams in India.
Last but not the least, since there was no NSSB for a long time and no recruitment due to Covid pandemic and other reasons, it is hoped that at least 5 years age relaxation is given to job applicants from Nagaland (over and above the age relaxation for Scheduled Tribes). We request for age relaxation because the private sector in Nagaland has very less source of employment and that too with very less salary which is just not enough. Therefore the public sector is the main hope for jobs to the unemployed graduates in Nagaland.
It is hoped that the policy makers will give a thought to the grievances mentioned here. The unemployed students have high hopes from the new team of NSSB. We hope that it will be a source of fairness and equity and will correct many other historical wrongs that have continued so far in our recruitment system.
