National Recruitment Agency - Pros & Challenges ~ Group Discussion Ideas

Table of Contents

Theme:

In August 2020, Union cabinet approved the proposal of the ‘National Recruitment Agency‘ (NRA). This ‘One Nation – One Exam‘ concept was proposed in the budget speech in February 2020.
NRA will conduct the Common Entrance Test to select candidates for non-gazetted government jobs. The recruiting agencies such as SSC, RRB will conduct the next levels to finalize the candidates.
The test will be conducted twice per year.
At present, NRA will conduct CET for SSC, RRB & IBPS. In the coming days, it will be the common entrance test for all the 20 recruiting institutions of the central government.

Pros:

This will reduce the burden on students. It saves time & effort. And it also saves money, as there will no need to pay a fee for multiple exams, and travel expenses.
Single test in place of many individual tests will save time, money and human resources for the country.
As this will be an online test, the result will be displayed immediately. This will eliminate the need for waiting to apply for the second stage of the exam or for other jobs.
This test will reduce the burden to study different syllabuses for different exams. The single syllabus can save a lot of precious time for the government job aspirants.
The score cars will be valid for 3 years. And job aspirants can take the exam, again and again, to improve their score till they attain the maximum age limit.
There will be approximately 1000 centres in every district for the exam. Till now, applicants had to travel to cities to write these entrance tests. Some people couldn’t take the exam for this reason. Now, the increase in access will help many applicants in attending the exam.
Till now, central government exams are conducted in only English & Hindi languages. Applicants who are not comfortable with both of these languages were at a disadvantage. Now, with NRA the common entrance test will be conducted in 12 languages, and later it will be conducted in all the 22 languages that are mentioned in the 8th schedule of Indian constitution. This will be very beneficial to those who want to take an exam in their mother tongue.
It was mentioned that there will be a special focus on 117 Aspirational Districts that are in states with low social development indices. This will help in increasing their representation in central government jobs.
The score will also be available for private companies to help them with recruitments.
This Common entrance test will increase transparency in recruitments.

Challenges:

Due to pandemic, the unemployment rate is increasing and hence several youngsters are in the hope that through the NRA, the government will fill many vacancies. But at present, the number of government jobs is shrinking. And as private participation in some government sectors is increasing, the number of government jobs will be further reduced. Creating more government jobs is a challenge for the centre.

Conclusion:

The establishment of National Recruitment Agency will be a milestone in recruitments for government jobs. This is helpful for all the parties involved – job seekers, recruiting institutions & government by saving money and effort.

Photo by Oleg Magni from Pexels

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