UP teacher recruitment exam halted again, leaving 13 lakh aspirants in limbo

Two days after the Uttar Pradesh Education Service Selection Commission (UPESSC) abruptly postponed the Trained Graduate Teacher (TGT) written examination once again, thousands of aspirants remain unsure of what comes next — and why.

The notice, uploaded on November 18, the very day the test was scheduled to begin, postponed the two-day examination without any explanation and promised that revised dates would be announced later.

This is not the first— and far from the only — delay. Multiple officials concede that the commission has slipped into dysfunction since the resignation of its first permanent chairperson, Professor Kirti Pandey, who stepped down in September just a year into her term.

With no successor appointed since, and an acting chairperson functioning with limited authority, recruitment processes have slowed to a crawl. No official is willing to speak on record about the disruption — but insiders admit that “several” recruitment exams have been pushed back for this reason.

The TGT test, meant to fill nearly 3,000 teaching posts, has now been postponed five times, student groups say. The Post Graduate Teacher (PGT) exam for about 2,000 posts has met a similar fate — postponed four times, with no rescheduled date two months after the October examinations were pushed back.

“Aspirants prepare for months and then the calendar changes overnight,” said Prashant Pandey, president of the Pratiyogi Chhatra Sangarsh Samiti, which has been protesting the delays. The group plans to write to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over what it calls the commission’s “excessively casual functioning”.

For lakhs of young applicants preparing for teaching careers, the uncertainty has become emotionally and financially draining. Amrendra Kumar, 28, who moved to Prayagraj to prepare for the exam, said: “With every postponement, motivation drops. It’s mentally exhausting. We’re losing trust in the system.”

Opposition parties have seized on the crisis, accusing the BJP government of indifference toward unemployed youth. Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary called the repeated delays a “harassment and insult of aspirants”, while Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Ajay Rai alleged the government is “ruining careers” by failing to conduct even a single major recruitment examination on time.

The stakes are enormous. Nearly 13 lakh candidates are now waiting for revised dates for TGT and PGT exams — in a state where recruitment examinations have repeatedly been disrupted by mismanagement and paper leak crackdowns. The last major recruitment exam to be held in UP was for police constables in March, where nearly 40 lakh applied for about 60,000 posts.

For the state’s aspiring teachers, the uncertainty continues — and without a full-time chairperson at the commission, there is no clear sign of when it will end.