How Indians crack one of the world’s toughest exams
For close to three years, Gamini Singla stayed away from friends, did not go on a vacation and avoided family meetings and celebrations.
She stopped binging on takeaways, going to the cinema and stepped away from social media. Instead, at her family home in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, she woke up at the crack of dawn, pored over text books and studied for up to 10 hours a day. She crammed, did mock tests, watched YouTube videos of achievers and read newspapers and self-help books. Her parents and brother became her only companions. “Loneliness will be your companion. This loneliness allows you to grow,” Ms Singla says.
She was preparing for the country’s civil service exams, one of the toughest tests in the world. Rivalled possibly only by gaokao, China’s national college-entrance exam, India’s Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exams funnel young men and women every year into the country’s vast civil service.
A million candidates apply to appear in the gruelling three-stage exam every year. Less than 1% make it to the written test, the second stage. In 2021, when Ms Singla sat for the exam, the success rate was the lowest in eight years. More than 1,800 made it to the interviews. Finally, 685 men and women qualified. Ms Singla stood third in the exam, along with two other women ahead and behind her, a first in the history of the exam. She qualified to become a part of the elite IAS (Indian administrative service), which mostly runs the country through collectors of India’s 766 districts, senior government officials and managers of state-owned companies.