The bureaucracy in India, largely because of its colonial experience, remains a hustler’s token to rarefied air. Especially within the bourgeoisie, it continues to be seen as a gateway to power, dignity, and, in the language of officialdom, “the opportunity to serve”.
Every year, more than a million young Indians pursue this aspiration, fuelled by a coaching industry that thrives on the opacity of the recruitment process and the Commission’s indifference towards transparency.
This year’s Civil Services Preliminary Examination, conducted on 24 May, once again brought these issues into focus. The GS-1 paper was widely regarded as one of the most difficult and arbitrary in history. Unpredictability has always been a feature of the UPSC examination, but in recent years, it has increasingly given way to randomness.
At the heart of the problem is the nature of the syllabus itself. Most topics end with an innocuous-looking “etc”, but the weightage given to this undefined “etc.” appears to have grown significantly. The Commission does not recommend any reference material either. In a recent press release, it stated that answers to its 2026 Prelims questions can be traced to standard textbooks, journals, government websites, government press releases, and reputed newspapers, among other sources.
Yet it has never clarified what constitutes a standard textbook, which journals matter, or which newspapers aspirants should prioritise.
The consequences are obvious. Standard books vary across universities. Credible journals publish thousands of articles annually. Nearly every ministry and department maintains its own website, while the PIB (Press Information Bureau) releases at least a score of updates every day. Even newspapers present a challenge. While The Hindu and The Indian Express dominate the ecosystem, there is no equivalent for Hindi-medium aspirants.
It is this uncertainty that coaching institutes monetise. They provide notes, compilations, and current affairs magazine to fill a vacuum that the Commission itself has created. Teams of content writers are employed to convert newspapers, government reports, and policy documents into bulky compilations that promise to cover everything that UPSC might ask. Alongside these are courses on option elimination, guesswork techniques, and last-minute strategies designed to navigate an examination that increasingly appears impossible to prepare for.
The Mains Examination suffers from a different problem. Its syllabus is comprehensive, but the examination has gradually become a model-answer regurgitation exercise. In the 1970s, aspirants were expected to demonstrate substantial academic depth through multiple optional subjects, often at graduate and postgraduate levels.
Today’s examination is structured differently. Candidates write four General Studies papers containing around 20 questions each in 3 hours. This leaves barely seven minutes to answer a question in approximately 200 words. Unsurprisingly, among aspirants, a common phrase has emerged: “Answer writing is muscle memory.”
Success in mains depends less on original thinking but on the ability to reproduce frameworks, keywords, and structures under severe time and space constraints. Coaching institutes have built entire business models around this, offering answer-writing programmes, mentorship courses, and test series at substantial cost.
Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is also visible in the Ethics paper. What was conceived as an assessment of moral reasoning is now a competition of quotations, case studies, ethical jargon, and ready-made templates designed to impress examiners rather than demonstrate any real judgement.
The Personality Test, the final stage of the process, has similarly become an extension of the coaching ecosystem. Institutes conduct extensive mock interviews (at times popularising misleading and irrelevant questions), dissect candidates’ DAF (Detailed Application Forms), and prepare model responses. These services are free of cost because successful candidates become valuable marketing assets.
The result is that a crucial stage already carrying only 13.6% of the total weight is further distorted. Despite its title, this stage relies entirely on a conventional interview before a panel and incorporates little by way of group discussions and situational assessments.
The coaching industry flourishes because of this combination of an open-ended syllabus, a mechanical examination process, and the Commission’s culture of secrecy. Today, it is a Rs 3,000 crore industry of celebrity faculty, motivational speakers, and mentors. It’s marketed through cold calls, YouTube shorts, and Reels that display the ‘aura’ of a bureaucrat, trapping innocent youth.
The cycle repeats itself every year. After the examination, coaching institutes criticised UPSC for a poor paper. A few days later, they unveiled new strategies to conquer the same unpredictability. They update their material to include themes that appeared in the latest paper and then claim that the questions came directly from their notes.
For many aspirants, the cost of this deceit is not merely financial. The examination consumes some of the most productive years of their lives, leaving them as “lab rats” of a corporate setup that sells a dream that has only 0.2% chance of turning real.
Om Shukla is B.Tech. student of National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. Views are personal.
Also Read: Why India’s graduates are falling for the ‘100% placement’ guarantee