CHENNAI: Hundreds of job seekers from Tamil Nadu, who travelled 600-1,000 kilometres to Hyderabad and various parts of Andhra Pradesh, faced severe hardship after the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) on Wednesday cancelled the computer-based test (CBT) stage II for Assistant Loco Pilot (ALP) posts due to technical issues.
The exams were also called off in several other regions across the country. The recruitment drive was conducted by all RRBs across India to fill 18,799 ALP posts.
According to sources, the decision to cancel the exam was made around 11.45 am on Wednesday after candidates who entered the exam centre in the first shift encountered technical issues, as the question papers failed to load on the computers. Efforts to fix the problem for nearly an hour proved unsuccessful, leading to the RRB cancelling and rescheduling it to a later date, as per official sources. The rescheduled date for exam will be notified shortly.
The RRB notification cited technical failures as the reason for the cancellation and assured candidates that the exams would be rescheduled for the affected centres.
A total of 6,315 candidates had qualified for CBT II under RRB Chennai for 493 ALP positions. The RRB’s decision to allocate exam centres in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for applicants from Tamil Nadu was flayed by candidates and certain political parties.
Narrating his ordeal, S Krishnan, a candidate from Salem who travelled to Hyderabad, said, “All our efforts, time, and money spent travelling to Hyderabad went to waste because of the RRB’s negligence. I waited outside the venue for nearly four hours. I have already spent `2,500 on the trip. The stress of preparing for the exam will continue until we write the final exam.”
Another candidate, Sebastian Raj, added, “There were four centres in Hyderabad, and the exam was cancelled at all of them. Each centre had 200 to 300 candidates from Tamil Nadu. I’ve been preparing for this RRB exam and others for nearly five years.”