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U.P. Police exam aspirants’ story: ‘Forced to travel in train lavatory, still fortunate’
Transportation hits a snag in Lucknow as inadequate arrangements leave aspirants in discomfort and disbelief
Almost all trains coming and leaving Charbagh railway station had passengers overflowing, some of them sitting inside lavatories, others entering and exiting through windows, while thousands were forced to stand or those not so fortunate, hanging from the doors, on Saturday.
Not very different was the scene at bus stations, metro stations, and other locations, as about 3 lakh candidates from across the state began arriving on Friday night for the UP Constable Civil Police Direct Recruitment Examination. However, on Saturday, the early morning crush of people at these locations revealed the administration’s planning and preparation, which infuriated candidates.
“I travelled inside the train’s toilet for hours to reach Lucknow. I’m still lucky to get a seat many could not board,” said Ashwini Kumar at Charbagh railway station, who came from Varanasi.
“I had to drop two trains before boarding one to reach Lucknow. I was somehow able to get a seat on the floor,” said Mohamma Imran, who came from Kanpur.
Not just the train, the platforms of Charbagh station were left with no space to sit. Hundreds were queued up at different sections of the platform to charge their phones at the few charging stations. “No arrangements have been made by the Railways. I waited for over two hours to charge my phone,” said Shubham Sahu, an aspirant from Bihar on Saturday evening while he waited to return.
Long queues at Metro stations
The scenes at Lucknow Metro stations were no different as thousands of aspirants flocked to several metro stations to reach their destination faster. “I came to take the Metro to avoid the traffic bottleneck, but it’s even worse because there are huge lines for tickets and it would take an additional few minutes to get me closer to the train,” said Ishtiaq Raza at Hazratganj Metro Station.
The videos of these scenes went viral on social media, drawing criticism from Netizens. “Lucknow the City of Nawabs !! Beautiful Metro & scary crowd,” wrote an X user, Sanjay.
Mocking the scene, another user commented, “Muskuraiye, aap Lucknow mein hai.”
Smooth travel, barring few routes
In all, 1,205 buses rolled into the Alambagh and Qaiserbagh bus stations on February 17, carrying what Transport Corporation officials claim to be largely aspirants for the police exam. According to the Corporation officials, 75% - more than 40,000 - of the passengers were police exam aspirants.
A few routes, however, did see some halts and bottlenecks due to the sheer numbers, with the highest number of passengers being on the Prayagraj route.
“The slow pace of the bus on the way here was making me nervous, as I was appearing in the morning batch, but after some time the speed picked up,” shared Sushant Agarwal, who was travelling from Prayagraj. “While deboarding was a challenge as lots of buses were arriving at the station around the same time, we did not have any issues with the crowd at the station,” he added.
Another aspirant who was in the evening batch for the examination said that while the start of the journey was slow, navigating at the exam centre near Matiyari was difficult as there was a lot of crowd.
Police bandobast lacking
The situation was quite contrary to the claims made by the city police that foolproof arrangements had been made by coordinating with railways and road transportation.
“An approximate number of 2,74,944 aspirants are supposed to take the examination in a total of 113 centres in two days,” a Lucknow police press note had read on Friday
“Roadways buses will be operated from various places to examination centres where public transport facilities are not available,” the press note had read.
“Eco Garden police station area Alambagh has been identified for the accommodation for a large number of candidates coming from different states and different districts of the state,” said joint commissioner of police (L&O) Upendra Kumar Agarwal.
‘Math, reasoning tough, Hindi easy’
LUCKNOW: After the examination, aspirants said that a few sections of the question paper were challenging for many, particularly the mathematics and logical reasoning portions.
“The reasoning questions were tricky. I was even more confused as all the options seemed similar, and I ended up leaving out many questions in that section because of this,” said Lalit Kumar who came from Rajasthan.
Shreyansi Jha who had come from Gwalior, “Most of the questions in the paper were easy, especially Hindi. It took some time to solve some mathematics and reasoning questions.”
Prince from Delhi said that while Hindi and General Knowledge portions were simple, he was unable to solve half of the Math and reasoning questions.
