Doctorates and engineers among 10 lakh hopefuls for 9,200 patwari posts

Bhopal More than 10 lakh people, including engineers and doctorate degree holders, have applied for about 9,200 Madhya Pradesh lower level revenue official posts, which has caught the MP Professional Examination Board (MPPEB) officials off guard.

The number of applications indicates that every 70th person in the state applied for the job of maintaining revenue land records, which observers believed was an indication of rampant unemployment in MP.

Although a candidate just needs to be a graduate to sit for the exam, MPPEB officials said about one-third of the applicants for the lowest job in revenue department possessed PhDs, post-graduate degrees in arts, science and technical education.

Sources in the MPPEB, which conducts the test for the Patwari posts, said close to 1.5 lakh candidates had engineering degrees, 1 lakh were MBA graduates and about 50,000 held post-graduate degrees in arts and science.

“We really didn’t expect such a big number (of applications),” MPPEB examination controller AKS Bhadoria told Hindustan Times and added “we were expecting about 6 lakh candidates against these posts”.

The exam is scheduled to be conducted at 16 district headquarters in the state from December 9 to 31 in two shifts every day. The total number of posts advertised was 9,235 for which 10.20 lakh candidates have filled the application forms.

Although MPPEB authorities admit that they didn’t expect 10 lakh applications, they said the board was equipped to take care of the situation.

“The task is challenging but we recently successfully held exam for the sub-inspector and constable posts, for which too a number of candidates had applied”.

The last time the state held exams for patwari jobs was in 2012 and at that time, passing higher secondary was set as the eligibility criteria.

RTI activist Akshya Hunka, who recently organised a seminar for patwari job aspirants from economically weaker sectiond, said if passing intermediate exams was an eligibility criterion this time too then at least 25 lakh people would have applied for the post given the scale of unemployment in the state.

Hunka said that the exam is being conducted against the backdrop of growing resentment among the people of the state, especially farmers, over pending job applications with the revenue department. As a result, the state government has already announced a special drive to dispose of more than 15 lakh pending application received in the past four months.