Several candidates who were unsuccessful in the Punjab State Civil Services Combined Competitive Examination-2025 (PCS) Mains staged a protest outside the Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC) office in Patiala on Tuesday, demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into alleged irregularities in the selection process.
The protesting aspirants, who raised slogans against the commission and staged a sit-in outside its office, alleged unexplained delays and discrepancies in the selection process.
The protesters maintained that the commission’s earlier response had failed to address their concerns.
Gurvinder Kaur, an aspirant from Talwandi Sabo who failed to qualify, said the entire process had raised serious questions about the commission’s credibility.
“The lack of transparency has raised doubts about the selection process. The commission should share the complete details of the selected candidates instead of merely publishing their roll numbers, as was done in the preliminary examination. Several questions remain unanswered, fuelling suspicion. We demand a CBI probe to ensure a fair and impartial investigation into the alleged irregularities,” she said.
Pulkit Arora, an aspirant from Bathinda who was also participating in the sit-in, challenged PPSC chairman Major General Vinayak Saini (retd) to make public the details of the shortlisted candidates and the qualifications of the subject evaluators who assessed the answer sheets.
{{/usCountry}}Pulkit Arora, an aspirant from Bathinda who was also participating in the sit-in, challenged PPSC chairman Major General Vinayak Saini (retd) to make public the details of the shortlisted candidates and the qualifications of the subject evaluators who assessed the answer sheets.
{{/usCountry}}“The commission should disclose who evaluated the answer sheets and what their qualifications were. We have serious doubts about whether the evaluators were adequately qualified to assess the papers. I openly challenge the PPSC to put the answer sheets of the selected candidates in the public domain so that everyone can see how the candidates were evaluated and why they were shortlisted,” he said.
Joining the protesters, former Union minister Ravneet Singh Bittu also questioned the decision to publish only roll numbers in the results without making the candidates’ names public. He alleged that this raised doubts about the transparency of the results.
The controversy erupted soon after the PPSC declared the results of the PCS Mains on November 4, provisionally shortlisting 751 candidates for interviews against 331 advertised vacancies.
The unsuccessful candidates and opposition parties have alleged several anomalies in the results. These include claims that 86 shortlisted candidates figured in groups of three, four and six consecutive roll numbers, while some examination rooms reportedly had 10 to 11 candidates shortlisted out of just 24 who appeared.
The PPSC has already rejected the allegations, describing them as a misinterpretation of statistical data. In its clarification, the commission said 3,959 candidates appeared at 12 examination centres in Patiala and 751 were shortlisted, translating into a success rate of around 19%.
Refuting the claim that 24.21% of successful candidates came from a single centre, the commission said the highest number shortlisted from any one centre was 106, accounting for 14.1% of the total. It pointed out that 496 candidates had appeared at that centre, making it the second-largest examination centre.
On the issue of consecutive roll numbers, the commission said such patterns had also appeared in previous PCS examinations. It cited 26 groups of consecutive roll numbers in the 2018 examination and 28 in 2020, compared with 118 groups in the 2025 examination. It also maintained that no candidate who was absent had been declared qualified and that biometric as well as manual attendance records were maintained at all centres.