Responding to Union Minister of State (MoS) Anupriya Patel's letter urging UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to end the practice of the reservation seats meant for SC, ST and OBC candidates becoming "unreserved" in government recruitment process, the Adityanath government has sent a detailed reply to her, stating that the quota posts remaining vacant after the selection process are not converted to unreserved posts and are carried forward to the next recruitment process. Anupriya Patel is also the national president of the Apna Dal (Soneylal), which is a key ally of the ruling BJP in UP. Before responding to Anupriya’s letter, the BJP-led NDA dispensation in UP collected detailed reports from different government bodies including the Commissions and the departments engaged the recruitment process. Based on these reports, the UP government’s Department of Appointment and Personnel sent a response to the Union MoS late Friday night. In the reply, Additional Chief Secretary of Department of Appointment and Personnel Devesh Chaturvedi has cited such reports received from official entities where appointments are done directly though interviews. "The government in its response has informed the MoS about the factual situation," Chaturvedi told The Indian Express. As per his letter, the UP Public Service Commission has informed the government that the interview process uses coding on the basis of which the name, reservation, category and age of the candidates remain undisclosed and that such personal information are not made available to the interview board. Also, the interview board does not mention “not suitable”, the letter stated. Instead, it mentions the grading which is converted into marks to be noted in the mark-sheets. The minimum qualifying marks for such interviews is 40 per cent for General, EWS and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and 35 per cent for Scheduled Castes (SCs)/Scheduled Tribes (STs). "Against the vacancies, if candidate of any category does hold the minimum qualifying marks or candidates are not available, the Commission at its own level has not the right to convert all these unfilled vacancies into any other category. However, as per government orders, such vacancies are carried forward," reads the government’s letter. The UP Subordinate Services Selection Commission, that conducts the selection process for filling Group "C" vacancies for different departments, has also informed the government that the interview processes have already been ended in the selection process of Group "C" posts through new rules implemented in 2017. It has also told the government that for the posts advertised before 2017 in which the selection has to be done through the interview but it is still in process due to certain legal complexities, there is no provision of selecting unreserved category candidates on the posts of reserved categories and that it has also not done any such selection in the past. Chaturvedi’s letter to Anupriya said that the UP government’s higher education department also stated that it does not convert the reserved category posts to unreserved ones if any candidate is not found eligible for these posts. In her letter dated June 27 to CM Adityanath, Anupriya said she had been contacted repeatedly by candidates belonging to OBC and SC/ST categories with the complaint that in the competitive exams held by the state involving recruitment based solely on interviews, they were often declared “Not Found Suitable”. As a result, “inn vargon se aane wale kisi bhi abhyarthi ka chayan nahin kiya jaata (no candidate from these categories is selected)”. She also said that after this process was repeated many times, “finally, the reserved posts are declared un-reserved”. In her letter, the MoS demanded that there should be “tatkaal rok (immediate stop)” to this happening, so that “inn vargon se aane wale abyrathiyon se utpann ho rahe aakrosh (the rising anger among the candidates of these categories)” can be checked.
