Onlykashmir.in News Desk
Aspirants appearing in the Jammu and Kashmir State Eligibility Test (JKSET) have urged Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to defer the Kashmir Marathon by one week, citing a clash with the examination scheduled for October 25 and concerns over possible traffic restrictions on the day.
The candidates said that holding the two events together could create difficulties for examinees travelling to their designated centres. They said nearly 30,000 candidates were expected to appear in the test and called for the marathon to be rescheduled so that no candidate faces inconvenience.
The JKSET/LASET-2026 examination, conducted by the University of Kashmir under the framework of the University Grants Commission (UGC), is scheduled for Sunday, October 25, according to the official notification issued by the J&K State Eligibility Test Agency. The test determines eligibility for appointment as Assistant Professor in universities and colleges across Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
The third edition of the Kashmir Marathon is also scheduled for October 25. According to figures reported by the Tourism Department, 1,807 runners, including 73 foreign participants, have registered for the event. The department aims to establish the marathon as an annual fixture and promote Kashmir as a destination for sports tourism.
The aspirants said that marathon-related traffic restrictions and movement arrangements could affect candidates attempting to reach their examination centres on time. They appealed to the Chief Minister to intervene and ask the organisers to shift the marathon by one week, allowing both events to proceed without creating difficulties for candidates. Rescheduling the marathon, they maintained, would safeguard the interests of examinees while still allowing the tourism event to take place on a revised date.
For many of the candidates, the eligibility test is a crucial step towards a career in higher education, and it is held only at fixed intervals. A missed paper because of road closures or delays could therefore mean a long wait for another opportunity, which explains the anxiety among aspirants. Examination rules typically require candidates to report at their centres well before the start of the paper, leaving little room for last-minute delays caused by diversions or blocked roads.
Large public events such as marathons usually involve road closures, diversions and heavy deployment of personnel along the route, particularly in a city like Srinagar where alternative routes are limited. Whether any such arrangements would overlap with the routes to examination centres has not been clarified by the authorities in the information available. There has also been no official response so far to the aspirants’ demand.
The request now places the matter before the government, which must weigh the preparations already made for the marathon against the concerns of thousands of candidates who will be travelling to centres across the Union Territory on the same Sunday.
