BHUBANESWAR: The recently constituted Odisha Police Recruitment Board (OPRB) will not just make fresh recruitments of sub-inspectors (SI) this year, but has also been asked by the government to take over the pending 2018 and 2019 work from the Odisha Staff Selection Commission (OSSC). The OSSC had been conducting the SI recruitments since 1994.
After 27 years, the state government formed the OPRB to recruit SIs owing to the OSSC’s failure and inordinate delay in holding the exams on time. The OSSC has not yet completed the SI recruitments, the advertisements of which were published in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
In fact, the OSSC itself recently proposed to the government to hand over the charge of the pending recruitments to the OPRB.
“We will make the SI recruitments for the 2017 batch. We had already conducted the written test. But the subsequent phases of the examinations were delayed owing to certain technical issues, including the Covid-19 pandemic. We will complete the 2017 recruitment. Since we could not start the recruitment process for the 2018 and 2019 batches, the OPRB will now hold their tests,” OSSC’s chairman Nirmal Chandra Mishra told TOI.
The OPRB, which was preparing to conduct the 2021 SI recruitment, will soon come up with the exam dates for the applicants, who had applied in 2018 and 2019. “We have asked the OSSC to share the details of the applicants of the two previous years. We will first complete the recruitment of the 2018 and 2019 batches before holding the 2021 tests,” a senior OPRB official said.
The OPRB had tentatively planned to hold the tests of the SI aspirants of the 2021 batch between August 8 and 16. However, the pending recruitments cast a shadow on the fresh ones.
Unlike the OSSC recruitment procedure, which used to involve several rounds of tests, the new exam patterns framed by the OPRB aim to expedite the selection of the SIs. For the first time, the board has introduced technology in the appointment process. The applicants would be asked to write the papers through computer-based recruitment examination. Viva voce has been done away with. The SIs would be selected following written and physical tests.
