Maharashtra CM says: MPSC will be held on 7 April

The Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said that there was no need to postpone the Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) entrance examination to be held on Sunday, April 07, 2013.

The same exam earlier slated for Feb10 was postponed because the departments were unable to provide the vacancy details to commission due to fire tragedy in Mantralay.

Around 3.5 lakh students in the state who were to appear for the exams. The candidates were asked to download hall tickets from the MPSC website on Tuesday, but because of the virus all the data on the website was erased. The virus has corrupted data even on the recovery server.

The issue was also raised in the state legislative council, where legislators from all parties demanded that exams should be postponed by at least seven days. Legislative Council chairman Shivajirao Deshmukh also suggested that government should give priority to postponing the exam.

Mr Chavan said that the MPSC members have informed the government that all the precautions have been taken to allow all candidates to appear.

He explained that, "Candidates have been informed through SMS and email to re-send preliminary details, including name, centre name, photo ID online and after the verification, candidates will able to take printouts of hall tickets instantly. If any candidate is unable to do so, he/she should go to their respective examination centre with their photo ID, fee receipt and he/she will be allowed to appear for the examination."

The MPSC has now asked students to fill their information online again and submit it before April 4. However, students complained that they were not able to open the website even on Wednesday.

"The second alternative suggested by the MPSC that students who do not get hall tickets should directly go to their respective exam centre, is also impractical because those who do not get hall tickets would not know their exam centre," said leader of Opposition Vinod Tawde.

The legislators expressed fear that the stress of filling in the forms for the next two days would affect the students' performance. While the deadline for filling up the online forms expires on Thursday at around 5 pm, till Wednesday morning only 45,000 out of the 3.5 lakh students had managed to fill their online forms again.

However, Rajendra Manglukar secretary of the MPSC said that the decision to reschedule the exams would be taken only after August 5.