India’s toughest contest November 5, 2009
Posted by southasiamasala in India, Sullivan, Kate.trackback
Kate Sullivan
Reprinted from Inside Story. Read the full article …
It’s a Tuesday afternoon in early October and Prakash is taking me to his afternoon preparatory class at Vajiram & Ravi, one of the dozens of institutes in Delhi that train candidates for India’s civil services exams. Still buoyant despite two failed exam attempts, Prakash is heading for a class that prepares students for the optional paper in psychology he hopes to tackle next year. The classes last two and a half hours and run seven days a week for twenty weeks or more.
The classroom is already half full, with around 200 chairs crammed into a room that can’t be much more than fifty square metres. Once the students have manoeuvred their way into a seat, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to get out again until after the class. And it’s unlikely they’d want to. The scarcity of places and the high cost of the course spell a dropout rate of less than 1 per cent. Though October marks the tail end of the course, and several students are immersed elsewhere in preparation for the fast-approaching Mains exams, the room fills quickly. Prakash points out three young women – a doctor, an engineer and a journalist – sitting pressed up behind us.
Mukhul Pathak, a well-known psychology lecturer whose coaching successes have made his subject a popular choice for the optional paper, marches up to a narrow podium and begins his class. Within seconds he has the entire room in uproarious laughter. Dressed in a striped cream and peach short-sleeved shirt and moss-green corduroy trousers, energetic and humorous, he shows no trace of having taught this same course perhaps twice a year for the past fifteen years. On his wrist hangs a thick gold watch of such proportions that from the fifth row I can see that it runs ten minutes fast. He radiates commitment, efficiency and affluence.
Above: Govind Jaiswal, whose father (right) was a rickshaw driver, was a successful candidate in the 2006 civil services exam. His coaching classes in Delhi were financed by the sale of family land. Photo: OutlookIndia
Reprinted from Inside Story. Read the full article …
Interesting article- A few observations though – Nowadays there is a strong regional bias. Candidates from Northern India & some States like Orissa show a marked preference for a career in Civil services inspite of the opportunities in corporate world. Generally the popularity of civil services in the western and southern states is low. There is also a strong trend towards using regional languages as medium of examination apart from the broader spectrum of society that is progressively being represented in the civil service.
Most interestingly, these days rarely would you find a bureaucrat’s offspring aspiring for a civil service career !!
Unfortunately, the civil services has also failed in grooming officers for increasingly specialized functions in modern world. Probably the one relic of colonialism that has transcended the waves of change elsewhere…