Just a day after conducting the Preliminary exams for the recruitment of the Patent and Design Examiners, the Quality Control Council of India (QCI) on September 4, announced that the same has been cancelled due to “some irregularities/ technical glitches.”
The reason for such a move is stated as “to ensure fairness, credibility, and transparency in the recruitment process.” But it is surprising to see that the public notice neither specifies what these irregularities and technical glitches were nor does it bear signatures of any authorized personnel, unlike the other advertisements and notices on the QCI’s website (see here, here and here) who have signatures of at least 1 officer.
Furthermore, the public notice states that the decision to cancel the exam was taken by the “Competent Authority” but this Competent Authority has not been defined either in the public notice nor in the Notification for recruitment. However, as observed in an earlier post, the notification does clarify that all the decisions related to this recruitment were to be made and enforced by the QCI and thus, it’s perhaps the QCI who is taking this call.
Cancelling the exams right after conducting them is surely a drastic move and will cause inconveniences to the candidates as well as the organizers. Perhaps the best way out of this would have been to give some assurances or justification for such an extreme step. Unfortunately, the public notice is unclear on both fronts.
What’s next now? The notice states that the new schedule for the examination shall be announced in due course and hopefully, that happens sooner rather than later.
