Respect your culture, society and language to learn about your country and equip yourself before aspiring for civil service jobs, UPSC chairman D P Agrawal exhorted the civil service aspirants who came for an interactive session here on Wednesday.
Speaking at the session organised by the Kerala State Civil Service Academy here, Agrawal said these days the students, who have to be part of the universities, quit the universities for attending coaching centres.
“But the coaching centres turn them into machines for mugging up things. One should study a subject in its depth,” he said. 70 per cent of science and engineering graduates who aspire for civil services prefer humanities as an optional subject. In that case, one has to go beyond peripheral knowledge to score high. “One has to study in-depth about his or her village, district, state and country before accumulating knowledge about the world. You should first be interested in knowing more about the society you live,” he said.
Stressing the need for developing respect for languages, especially for our own languages, he said that there was no truth in the propaganda that UPSC was against regional languages. Maximum freedom is given to choose languages. Actually one who learns languages can be a better person,” the chairman, who was a former professor in IT at the IIT said. “The Commission supports all languages in the 8th Schedule. We are committed to respecting languages. The conclusion that we are against a particular language is not true,” he said.
Agrawal also pointed out that irrespective of the language chosen for the main exam, there is an option to select any language for the interview. “There will be interpreters to translate. We take expert interpreters from Parliament. But one has to give clear answers. In case of interpreters making mistakes we will blacklist them,” he said.