Recruitment examinations to the Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) will be conducted in 13 regional languages apart from English and Hindi from now on, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced on Thursday.
The decision will allow candidates appearing for the posts of Scale-I Officers and Office Assistants to give the test in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
The objective behind the new decision is to provide a level playing field and to expand employment possibilities for local youths, Sitharaman wrote on Twitter.
Employees to the 45 RRBs in the country are selected through the Common Recruitment Process (CRP) conducted by the Institute for Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS). Currently, there are 90,000 working in these banks.
Congress Rajya Sabha MP GC Chandrasekhar had earlier raised the importance of conducting bank examinations in regional languages.
The lack of regional languages as the medium for the recruitment test was affecting the chance of many deserving candidates, a recent Twitter campaign had argued. The campaigners had argued that though proficiency in a regional language was essential to apply for the exam, conducting it only in English and Hindi was an unfair decision.
The first exam to be held in all the 15 languages - including English and Hindi - will be the CRP RRB-VIII mains to be held on August 3, 4 and 11 (for Officers -Scale 1) and on August 17, 18 and 25 (for Office Assistants).