M A I N   N E W S

South steals a march in Civil Services exam
All top three positions have been bagged by South Indians this year
Charu Singh
Tribune News Service

The second ranker is also a woman, Sweta Mohanty, who happens to be a computer engineer. Sweta has done her B.Tech in computer sciences from Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology of the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad. She won the second position in her second attempt at the civil services examination. While, RV Varun Kumar, a dentist from Chennai got the third rank and he has done his BDS from Ragas Dental College in Chennai. He made it to the Civil services in his third attempt. Some 203 women out of a total of 920 candidates have been selected for the Civil Services examination this year. Interestingly, all top three positions have been won by South Indians this year.

The top 25 candidates this year comprise 20 males and 5 females and out of these 25, 15 candidates are from an engineering background, 5 candidates are from commerce, management, humanities, science and social sciences and the remaining 5 are from medical sciences background. Some eight candidates among the top 25 have succeeded in making it to the list in their first attempt itself and 4 candidates from the top 25 have succeeded in their second attempt. Atleast, 28 candidates from the 920 who have been recommended are physically challenged and 14 are orthopaedically challenged. Also, 5 candidates are visually impaired and 9 are hearing impaired. A total number of 5,47,698 candidates applied for the examination for the year 2011 and some 2,69,036 candidates appeared for the Preliminary exam. The number of candidates who had qualified for the main exam held in Oct-Nov 2010 was 12,491 out of which 2589 candidates were shortlisted for the personality test conducted this year in March.