UPSC / KPSC / KEA Exams 🏘📚

With student concerns and KPSC mishaps being widely discussed, I want to highlight a major issue that affects many but often goes unnoticed. Whenever KPSC releases a job notification, the first thing we check is how many seats we are eligible for. However, if you are a non-rural, English-medium, general male candidate (including OBC creamy layer), you realize that 90% of the seats are already reserved. This means competing for the remaining 10% along with candidates who already benefited from reservations, this feels so demotivating to even write the exam. I often wonder how things would be if 50% of the seats were set aside for open competition, ensuring both horizontal and vertical reservations were accommodated within the rest 50% seats as per the Indra Sawhney judgment (which, to my understanding, only covers vertical reservations). such a system would guarantee that at least half the seats remain open for merit-based selection. For example, in the recent BCWD exam, this approach would have ensured that every candidate had at least 10 open seats to compete for, meaning the top 10 performers would have been assured selection. But with the current 90.5% total reservation, it increasingly feels like MERIT IS A MYTH in Karnataka government exams.