BJP Rajya Sabha MP Brij Lal said in Parliament on Thursday (April 2) that the Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT), one of the two qualifying preliminary papers for the Civil Service Examination (CSE), was the “biggest barrier to diversity” and should be abolished or rationalised. Lal stated that the paper has “skewed representation” among selected candidates. “Up to 65% of successful candidates are engineers, while humanities and arts graduates struggle with CSAT’s technical, mathematics-heavy and comprehension-based questions,” he said. The comments from Brij Lal, a retired IPS officer, are part of a larger debate that began when CSAT was first introduced. The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) conducts the CSE every year to recruit officials for various Group ‘A’ services, including the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and the Indian Police Service (IPS). The three-tier examination comprises the Prelims (objective, multiple-choice questions), the Mains (subjective questions) and the personality test or interview round. Until 2010, the Prelims comprised two papers. The first was General Studies, which carried 150 marks, and the second was a subject-specific paper, …