Chennai: Aspirants to all State government jobs would have to appear and clear a paper in Tamil language in the written examinations held by all recruiting agencies, including the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC), for selecting candidates, according to a government order.
The order, issued on the basis of a recommendation by the secretary of TNPSC, follows the announcement made on the floor of the State Assembly on September 13 by the Minister for Finance and Human Resources Palanivel Thiaga Rajan during the debate on the demands for grants for his department.
Thiaga Rajan had said that Tamil language paper would be made part of the recruitment examinations held to fill up vacancies in the government and government undertakings with a view to ensure that all the jobs went to Tamil youth.
So, Tamil language would be a qualifying paper, set at the standard of the class ten syllabus, and all job aspirants would have to score at least 40 per cent marks. The other subject examination papers of those not qualifying in the Tamil paper would not be corrected at all.
For the Group I, II and IIA services in the government, the recruitment examination would be held on two stages and for those candidates Tamil language paper would be a descriptive type test, being part of the Main Written Examination, the GO said.
Only if the candidate scores 40 per cent marks in the paper that test the language skills through a set of questions on translation, precise writing and so on, the rest of the test papers in the Main Examination would be taken up for evaluation.
For single stage examinations for Group III and IV and other categories in the present system of one general Tamil and one general English papers, only the Tamil paper would be retained and English paper eliminated. So the Tamil paper would be an eligibility and scoring test.
