New Delhi: In view of sudden surge in the cases of Covid-19, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has deferred the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination, 2021, which was scheduled to be held on  June 27, 2021. “Now, this examination will be held on October 10, 2021,” said the UPSC in a statement.

The Civil Services examination is held annually by the UPSC in three stages -- preliminary, main and interview -- to select officers of Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and Indian Police Service (IPS), among others. All the successful candidates have to apply again in the Detailed Application Form-I (DAF-I) for the Civil Services (Main) examination.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the resurgence and acceleration of Covid-19 transmission in India had several potential contributing factors including several religious and political mass gathering events which increased social mixings. “The resurgence in Covid-19 cases and deaths in India has raised questions on the potential role of B1617 and other variants (e.g., B117) in circulation,” said the WHO update.

The Central government in its new liberalized strategy, has made specific provisions that vaccines for Covid-19, which have been developed and are being manufactured in foreign countries and which have been granted emergency use authorization by the National Regulators of United States, European Medicine Agency (EU), United kingdom, Japan or which are listed in WHO (Emergency Use Listing), will be granted emergency use approval in India.

It also provides for post-approval parallel bridging clinical trials in place of conduct of prior local clinical trials as per the provisions prescribed under Second Schedule of the New Drugs & Clinical Trials Rules 2019. This is a radical departure from the past allowing rapid and simplified authorization of foreign vaccines by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI). /BI/