A high-powered committee formed by the railway ministry to look into the grievances of job seekers who lodged vigorous protests against the recruitment process, disrupting train movement in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh last month, held sessions with such candidates in Ranchi and Dhanbad on Saturday.

While 119 such candidates showed up at the meeting at the railway auditorium in Dhanbad, 40 did so on the premises of railway recruitment board office in Ranchi and voiced their grievances.

The committee of senior railway officials drawn from across the country that has Deepak Peter as chairperson and Rajiv Gandhi, Aditya Kumar, Mukesh Gupta and Jagdish Algar as members heard the candidates personally at both places.

“The candidates who had filled in the form declaring Hindi as their mother tongue and English as an alternative language were given English question papers only, not bi-lingual as was expected,” alleged a candidate in Ranchi.

The committee assured the candidates that their grievances would be looked into, informed a release issued by the Ranchi railway division, adding they were also organising a camp in Ranchi for gathering such grievances/suggestions from the candidates who could not attend the session.

“East Central Railway has opened outreach camps for the purpose at divisional level,” Rajesh Kumar, chief public relations officer of the ECR under which Dhanbad division falls added in another release issued from his office in Hajipur in Bihar.

The candidates who had appeared in a test for railway jobs under non-technical popular category (NTPC) started lodging vigorous protests after the results of the first computer based test (CBT) were declared by mid-January that affected train movement.

The results of CBT-1, declared on January 14, shortlisted candidates for CBT-2. The candidates protested saying the notification for the purpose, issued in 2019, did not mention about two tests but only one. These jobs, for group three and four positions, are not of highly-skilled in nature and as such there was no need for a complex selection procedure, they argued.

Their protests spread to many places in Bihar and also in Uttar Pradesh.

A Bihar bandh was also called in the last week of January that was supported by the Opposition and also by two minor NDA partners in Bihar, Vikashsheel Insaan Party and Hindustani Awam Morcha.

Even the Prime Minister's office had called a meeting of top officials of railway ministry to review the examination process, it was reported in a section of the media.

Then the railway ministry formed a high-powered committee to look into the grievances of the candidates that subsequently visited Jharkhand also.