Only 1 of 10 Haryana tehsildars clears Criminal Law paper as departmental exam sees mass failures

Of 24 candidates who sat for different papers, including Criminal Law, most failed subject after subject. One woman officer cleared all three papers she appeared for.

Representational image. | Until a Tehsildar clears exam, he/she is confined to revenue work such as mutations. He/she can't sit in judgment on cases before them. | Revenue department

Gurugram: Ten tehsildars appeared for the Criminal Law paper in Haryana’s latest departmental examination. Nine failed. The tenth candidate, Anju, was the only one who passed, and she cleared the other two papers she attempted as well, one of them with credit.

The result, gazetted by the Haryana government’s Revenue and Disaster Management Department on 12 August, and uploaded on the e-gazette Tuesday shows how steep the climb is for the state’s tehsildars trying to clear their mandatory departmental exams for promotions. 

The examination was held from 27 April to 1 May. Of the 24 candidates listed for exams held for different papers, the overwhelming majority failed at least one paper, and several failed nearly every subject they attempted.

The exam tested Tehsildars on Criminal Law, Civil Law, Revenue Law, Civil Services and Financial Rules, Local Funds, Patwar mensuration and Urdu, the working vocabulary of a Haryana revenue official’s daily life, from land records to court procedure.

Anju was the exception among the candidates. She passed Criminal Law and Civil Law, and cleared Revenue Law-I & II in the higher standard category — the only candidate on the list to record a clean sweep of the papers she sat for.

The order, issued under the Financial Commissioner Revenue’s office, carries a caveat common to such gazette notifications: any discrepancy noticed later will be rectified, and the results will be entered into the officers’ service books.

The order was signed by Dr Sumita Misra, Financial Commissioner Revenue and Additional Chief Secretary to the Haryana government.

The notification lists results paper-wise rather than declaring an overall pass or fail for each candidate, meaning officers can carry forward papers they have cleared and reattempt only the ones they failed in a subsequent exam, a common practice in Haryana’s departmental examination system for revenue officials.

The stakes riding on this exam are considerable. A senior officer in the Revenue and Disaster Management Department told The Print that clearing the departmental examination is what confers on a Tehsildar the powers of a presiding officer in his or her own court, as Assistant Collector, Grade 2.

Until a Tehsildar clears the exam, the officer told The Print, they are confined to revenue work such as mutations and registering sale deeds — they cannot sit in judgment on cases before them.

This is not the first time government officials in Haryana have en masse failed to clear their departmental examinations.

The Print had earlier reported on the Haryana PWD’s Departmental Professional Examination, in which only seven of the 61 assistant and sub-divisional engineers who appeared managed to pass all their papers — an 89 per cent failure rate that engineers said turned what had long been treated as a formality into a public embarrassment.

Prison department officials fared no better in their own departmental exam: 26 of 27 officers failed the Financial Rules paper, and 15 of 24 failed written and oral Hindi — this in a Hindi-heartland state — with only four clearing it at the higher standard.

The Print had also written about the Haryana Public Service Commission’s assistant professor recruitment exam, where just 57 candidates cleared the test against 600 advertised posts, a result that set off a debate over whether the fault lay with the candidates or with the manner in which the papers were evaluated.

(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)