UPSC at 100: What India's toughest exam takes from those who don’t crack it
Years of broken sleep, drained savings, strained relationships and lost opportunities: aspirants who walked away speak about the chase, and what came next
Keerthy S was in agony. Unable to move her head due to an excruciating headache, she looked up at the photograph on her bedroom wall, pinned there years earlier with a motivational caption: ‘I should become an IAS officer!’
For seven years, Keerthy, based in Bengaluru, got barely 4-5 hours of sleep a night. A spreadsheet that broke the syllabus into micro-topics and days made sure she stayed awake. Missing a day meant falling behind.
When a severe headache descended, Keerthy told no one for days. Seeing a doctor meant losing time allotted for a certain section of the syllabus. “I felt that I had given everything to this exam,” she said. “My health, my relationships, my financial stability, my everything,” she added.
Demands of attention, sacrifices
The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which selects India’s senior civil servants and gives wings to the aspirations of many like Keerthy, turned 100 on October 1.
The minuscule population that does clear the examination largely dismisses the belief that much hinges on luck.
Keerthy is among the lakhs of aspirants who have given every fibre of their being to the examination: preparing consistently and meticulously, sacrificing social life, hobbies and often relationships, patiently enduring failures, learning from mistakes and staying hopeful of making it.
A secure salary and the prestige and power of the administrative and police services draw thousands into years of preparation. Many shelve other careers, drain family savings and pay costs that rarely appear in coaching brochures.
Just a fraction make it
But not everyone gets to live their dreams. While success is rewarded with prestige and posts, the burden of failure is enormous. For many aspirants who make cracking the civil services the sole purpose of their life, a failed last attempt creates a future they are not prepared to navigate.
The exam is split into three extremely competitive qualifying stages: Preliminary (Prelims), Main (Mains) and Personality Test (Interview). Per UPSC data, only 0.17 per cent of the 5,76,793 candidates who appeared in the Prelims last year cleared the interview stage to finally become civil servants.
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About 6.04 crore people applied for the exams between 1947 and 2022, with a cumulative success rate of 0.53 per cent. It is a thin success rate, but it hasn’t deterred aspirants from applying. Applications rose from 3,869 in 1950-51 (for the relevant combined competitive examination, as per the UPSC’s first annual report) to 8.19 lakh in 2026.
Small town, mega dreams
Vineetha grew up in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, where her father is a head constable. Her parents were keen that she become an IAS officer, and this ambition was instilled in her early in life. Soon, it was her only dream. She studied electrical engineering to have a backup career option and, after graduating, was hired by Tech Mahindra.
But Vineetha didn’t take up the offer and instead decided to prepare for the UPSC. A job would make it difficult to go back to exam preparation, her father advised her. “A son’s success changes his life, but a daughter’s changes the next generation,” she recalled him saying.
Vineetha was the first in her family to attempt the UPSC exam, and she needed guidance. A brief internet search landed her on the homepage of an IAS coaching institute in Delhi, and she instantly decided to enrol there, a ‘blind’ decision, in hindsight. Her father took a loan to send her to Delhi for the preparation, and the tuition and hostel fees came to around Rs 5 lakh.
‘Prepare, but keep a Plan B ready’
Vineetha arrived in Delhi in May 2019. But by February 2020, the COVID pandemic had left her stranded in her hostel for three months. “The exam was postponed, and the flow of my preparation was broken,” she rued.
Later, she couldn’t clear the Prelims in three attempts. The failures set off a tirade back home. Relatives asked cruel questions, mocked her, and soon came up with unhelpful suggestions like marriage. “If I had been a man, they would have given me time till at least 30 and let me prepare in peace,” she said.
Several aspirants blame coaching institutes, providing tuitions for IAS exams at cut-throat prices, of peddling unrealistic expectations to aspirants and making them believe that nothing else matters in life.
A heartbroken Vineetha moved to Hyderabad, where she now creates content for a start-up academy. Her father reminds her that she has attempts left and can still make it, but Vineetha is not convinced.
Last year, she posted a video for aspirants that went viral. “Prepare for UPSC, but don’t prepare for it blindly. Whether you make it or not, earn your own money and have a plan B,” she said in the video.
Invisible psychological toll
Miles away in Noida, Vrinda Dixit spent four years preparing for the exams, investing almost Rs 5 lakh. The highest cost she paid, however, was the time and opportunity lost, she says. She could have used that time honing skills, gaining professional experience and earning money.
Vrinda Dixit spent four years preparing for the exams, spending almost Rs 5 lakh, but the biggest price she believes to have paid is the time and opportunity lost.
The psychological toll of the exam “isn’t discussed enough”, she observed. “UPSC can become the organising principle of your life. Your routine, your plans and even your sense of self-worth begin to revolve around the examination."
Halfway through her preparation, Vrinda did consider giving up and pursuing more feasible goals, but she went back to the books, held there by the sunk-cost problem. “After three or four years, you may feel that leaving would mean admitting that those years were wasted,” she noted.
Eventually, though, Vrinda realised that the exercise was futile, and that other public service professions are as honourable as the civil services. She moved into public policy at the Quality Council of India. “To work for the government or contribute to public life, you don’t really need to be an IAS officer,” she reasoned. “You can respect the ambition you had at 21 and still change your decision at 25.”
‘Don’t stop living your life’
Shruti Shrivastava of Madhya Pradesh faced a different dilemma. For starters, she had a bigger burden to bear: as the daughter of an IAS officer, she was expected to sail through the UPSC. She was completely shattered when, after clearing the Prelims and Mains, she was eliminated at the interview stage, she recalled.
Shruti Shrivastava, daughter of a former IAS officer, who cleared the Mains but failed the interview stage, has advice for aspirants: “Don’t isolate yourself— UPSC does not ask you to stop living your life.”
She decided to drop her preparation, convincing herself that the exam was just a means to “do something for society”. Having seen her father give nearly 13 hours a day to his job, she knew that being an IAS officer is demanding and leaves little time for family.
Quitting still took “a couple of months, even more than that”, Shruti said, because a goal becomes your identity and it takes time to sever the cord.
Two years ago, she took over the Sashaktikaran Foundation, a Madhya Pradesh-based nonprofit that works to improve access to quality education for rural children and to empower women through paid employment and training. What began with 10 women and 300-400 students now employs 31 rural women and works with about 900 children. Many of the women used their first salaries to buy scooters, mobile phones and sewing machines for their mothers.
Shruti’s advice to fellow aspirants goes beyond a Plan B. “Don’t isolate yourself — UPSC does not ask you to stop living your life,” she said. While anxiety hurts concentration, isolation contributes to failure, she observed.
Close, but not close enough
Keerthy from Bengaluru, mentioned earlier, had an impressive track record as a student. Hailing from a family of government employees, she scored 90 per cent in the 10th grade, chose civil engineering over medicine, and passed out from a top Bengaluru college with a 9.02 cumulative grade average. She turned down two campus job offers to prepare full-time for the civil services, and her parents, trusting her record, supported her.
Keerthy spent seven years preparing for the civil services and often ignored health concerns, thinking they would disrupt her study schedule.
After a year of coaching, she built her own study plan. She failed the Prelims in 2021 and 2022, and cleared it in 2023, only to be disqualified in the Mains by 10 marks. The next year brought more failures. With each one, she would weep and then pick up the threads again, strong in the belief that many do clear the exam in their last attempt.
After much family pressure to get married, and on the advice of her long-time boyfriend, she took a railway recruitment examination, hoping to return to UPSC preparation later. But she could not clear that exam either. The boyfriend’s parents, who already had reservations about the match due to caste issues, refused to accept her, and the couple parted ways.
When the world falls apart
Keerthy’s world fell apart. She was fully dependent on her parents, and this didn’t sit well with her. That was when she realised she needed to reboot her life. Soon, she travelled to Varanasi and Ujjain to “leave behind the burden, the expectations, and the unwanted judgment.”
Her Instagram post announcing that a chapter of her life was over went viral, resonating with many who had faced similar turmoil. “I understood that I am not alone,” she said.
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Keerthy’s life has now had an overhaul. At 29, she’s pursuing an MCA in artificial intelligence, mentoring UPSC aspirants and creating content. “I just want to live my life on my own terms, at my own speed, and not based on anybody’s expectations,” she said.
Parallel preparations
IPS officer Merugu Kaushik, who hails from Hyderabad and is now in the Maharashtra cadre, is one such person.
Kaushik, who cleared the exam in his first attempt, took a different approach. With a BE in Civil Engineering from Osmania University and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in Delhi, he had met IAS aspirants who had failed the exam four or five times. He decided he would first secure a career and then prepare for the competitive exam.
IPS officer Merugu Kaushik decided he would first secure a career and then prepare for the competitive exam.
His preparation ran parallel to his job. He would reach his workplace by 6 or 7 am so that he could leave by lunchtime, go home, and study. He quit his job only after clearing the Prelims. The job didn’t pay much, but it let him stay at home and save on time and expenses. “It turned out good for me,” he recalled.
Raring to go
Manish Meena, an IPS officer from Rajasthan, now in the Madhya Pradesh cadre, started from further back. Hailing from a rural farming family, he is the first in his bloodline to enter public service. The inspiration came from a fellow villager who joined the Indian Railway Traffic Service in 2012. Manish’s mother, who never attended school, told him, “You too should achieve something like this.”
In trying to impose our aspirations on her, we had become toxic without even realising it. Our daughter had stopped living her life: An aspirant's parent
Schooled in Hindi, Manish landed a seat at IIT-ISM Dhanbad without attending any IIT-JEE coaching, only to fail five papers in his first year. At a student charity that taught about 600 children, he met an IAS officer, and the ambition hardened. He started preparing for the UPSC in his third year of college.
In his last year of college, Manish spent 12 straight hours a day in the library. “I never attended a single party,” he said. During the pandemic, he studied for 18 months in his village. He skipped family weddings, and the relatives didn’t fuss. Clearing the UPSC, he said, was “a collective win for the family.”
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He cleared the exam and joined the Indian Revenue Service (IRS). He had turned down a campus offer of about Rs 18 lakh a year, and his mother backed him. “She’s never attended any school, but she knows the gravity of things,” he said with understandable pride.
The coaching trap
Several aspirants blame coaching institutes, which provide tuition for the IAS exams at cut-throat prices, of peddling unrealistic expectations and making them believe that nothing else matters in life.
Sumit Gomes, a Delhi resident and a former faculty member at Unacademy and StudyIQ, shelled out Rs 1.6 lakh as an aspirant in 2017 to join a batch of about 500 students. Within months, he said, several classes were clubbed together, removing any opportunity for individual attention.
He quit the coaching institute and studied alone. The flaw, Sumit said, is not the price. It doesn’t matter whether a student pays Rs 20,000 or Rs 2.5 lakh: they get content but not guidance. He plans to build a mentorship platform to fill that gap.
Because so much money is attached to the exam, coaching institutions push the idea that nothing else is worth pursuing while failures stay out of sight, leaving students, many from modest homes, with unrealistic expectations, he noted.
His advice, which some critics call demotivating, is to take a job first and then decide whether to continue. “High schoolers should aim for the best college; the exam is a route to a job, not a qualification. Luck matters too: The interview is an unpredictable game,” Sumit said, citing his own experience in 2022, when he bagged only 135 marks in the interview, far below the 175 or 180 he expected.
The cost of an obsession
Rajasthan-based Asmita Johri and Ashok Kumar, parents of a 28-year-old former UPSC aspirant, knew little about government service but came to see it as their daughter’s future.
“I saw other parents encouraging their children to prepare for the UPSC examination, and gradually, that aspiration became an obsession of mine,” Ashok said. “I would tell her, day and night, how she could change the future of our entire family by becoming an IAS officer.”
Only when their daughter developed an anxiety disorder did they confront the consequences. “In trying to impose our aspirations on her, we had become toxic without even realising it. Our daughter had stopped living her life; she was merely surviving around us,” said Asmita.
Not every family recognises the toll in time. In Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal district, Prakash Mathur has borrowed money from his landlord to pay for his daughter’s coaching in Delhi, hoping she will become an IPS officer. “We are lower-middle-class people who lead a simple life,” he said.
A seasonal downturn in his business, however, left him struggling to repay the loan, and his wife has mortgaged all her gold jewellery. “We don’t fully understand what this examination entails, but deep down, we are frightened by all the what-ifs,” he said.
A larger life out there
For Keerthy, the photograph with its motivational caption still hangs in her memory, though it no longer defines her. Her story, like Vineetha’s, Vrinda’s and Shruti’s, points to something the coaching brochures seldom mention: the dream of wearing the badge of an IAS or IPS officer is not the only way to serve, and the years spent chasing it need not be written off as wasted.
For the few who clear the exam, the UPSC is a triumph. For the vast majority who don’t, the real test begins afterwards, in learning to build a life that is larger than a single examination, and in finding the courage to say that the ambition they held at 21 deserves respect, but does not have to be the last word.
