Railway Recruitment Boards (RRBs) are silent on the matter of NTPC and Group D exam dates. However recent reports suggest that NTPC exam will be after December 15, 2019, and Group D will be in or after January 2020.
These dates have emerged in latest news on railway recruitment published by different newspapers. Few claim that these dates are backed by inputs, others have said it is speculation. However a different set of reports are strongly claiming that RRB NTPC as well as Group D exams will be held in January-February 2020 directly, and not this year.
It may be noted that the RRB NTPC exam date was supposed to be June to September 2019, and Group D exams were planned to be in September to October 2019. Their exam commencement dates have been delayed by 5 months and 2 months respectively already. And if the reports are true, then NTPC exam is postponed by at least 6 months, and Group D by at least 4 months from their originally planned dates.
Almost 8 months are going to be completed since the last date of application form submission of RRB NTPC (CEN 01/2019). Since then, neither an exam date has been announced, nor application status released. For the Group D (RRC CEN 01/2019) however, application status was finalised in September and now directly exam will be held after declaring its exam date and releasing admit card.
Meanwhile railways has received representations to conduct all competitive exams for railway recruitment in regional languages. For the direct recruitment, candidates get option to select between 15 languages, including Hindi, English, and 13 vernacular languages.
In the last 3 years, the vernacular language which has been opted by most candidates is Telugu, opted by 10,02,387 candidates. Second most popular language is Marathi for which 8,52,528 candidates have opted for. Third most popular language among railway job seekers is Bengali, chosen by 8,48,483.
Tamil (3,87,869), Gujarati (3,61,900), , Kannada (3,58,194), Malayalam (3,24,777), Odiya (3,06,587) were equally popular. Assamese language has been opted by 1,52,179 candidates so far, Urdu has been opted by 8,697, Manipuri by 877, and Konkani by 268 candidates from 2017 to 2019.
In the ongoing winter session in parliament, Minister of Railways, Piyush Goyal has stated that a total of 40,414 candidates have been empanelled in Indian Railways in the last three years. This includes 19,224 unreserved category candidates, 6,352 SC, 3,247 ST, and 11,591 OBC.
Railways had released 3 CENs in 2015-2016 for 18,512 vacancies. Then in 2017-2018, 2 CENs were released for 127573 vacancies. In 2018-2019, maximum number of CENs, equal to 5, and maximum vacancies, equal to 1,56,101 have been issued in the last five years.
Three of the released CENs ie 01/2019 (NTPC), 03/2019 (Ministerial), and RRC 01/2019 (Group D) are under process. RRBs will publish the exam dates soon after finalization of exam conducting agency.
Piyush Goyal also said “Indian Railways provide direct and indirect employment opportunities. Vacancies in the organization are filled through open recruitment. Indirect employment opportunities occur through schemes like Station Development Programmes that envisage private investments for construction, operation and maintenance of infrastructure, the commercial utilization of separable Railway land and redevelopment of stations, all of which create many business opportunities and boost employment generation.”
