Understanding CET

Ranjan K Baruah *

The recent announcement of NRA and CET shall bring new perspectives amongst students. Well, NRA stand for National Recruitment Agency and CET stands for Common Eligibility Test.

These are related to our job aspirants and now onwards CET is going to be a common term amongst our students. At present, candidates seeking government jobs have to appear for separate examinations conducted by multiple recruiting agencies for various posts.

Approximately 1.25 lakh government jobs are advertised every year for which 2.5 crore aspirants appear in various examinations. CET would enable these candidates to appear once and apply to any or all of these recruitment agencies for the higher level of examination.

The NRA shall conduct CET for recruitment to non-gazetted posts in government and public sector banks. This test aims to replace multiple examinations conducted by different recruiting agencies for selection to government jobs advertised each year, with single online test.

CET shall be held twice a year, there shall be different CETs for graduate level, 12th Pass level and 10th pass level to facilitate recruitment to vacancies at various levels.

Many aspirants will be able to appear the exam being conducted in their mother languages as CET shall be conducted in 12 major Indian languages.

To begin with CET will cover recruitments made by three agencies: viz. Staff Selection Commission (SSC), Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) and the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS). This will be expanded in a phased manner.

CET will be held in 1,000 centres across India in a to bid remove the currently prevalent urban bias and it will also encourage more female candidate to apply as centre will be available in all districts of the country . The CET score of the candidate shall be valid for a period of three years from the date of declaration of the result.

NRA will be a Society registered under the Societies Registration Act. It will be headed by a Chairman of the rank of the Secretary to the Government of India. It will have representatives of Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Finance/Department of Financial Services, the SSC, RRB & IBPS.

The Government has sanctioned a sum of Rs. 1517.57 crore for the National Recruitment Agency (NRA). The expenditure will be undertaken over a period of three years. It is envisioned that the NRA would be a specialist body bringing the state-of-the-art technology and best practices to the field of Central Government recruitment.

Let us get updates and prepare from now onwards. Let us not wait for any advertisement to be published but we may start preparing from now onwards for exam like CET. Young people from all over the country will compete for CET.

Students from North Eastern states must be updated and prepare well to crack exams like CET and get engaged in different government departments . There are many challenges as students may not be aware on the process but we have to learn and remain updated. Teachers from colleges or senior secondary schools must help out aspirants to learn the processes related to online exams.

There might be issue and challenges as new things bring challenges but it is a positive move and good step for job seekers and other aspirants. Appearing for single exams means saving time and resources.

Let us start browsing information and start preparing for the jobs. As there are many offices of central government, so, we may dream and plan to join them in our region or even get placed outside the region.

Healthy competitive exams shall produce human resources who can contribute towards the growth of the nation.