On August 30, thousands of candidates completed the final papers of the 2026 Civil Services (Main) Examination. For many, the coming months will bring the anxiety of waiting for results and, for those who qualify, preparation for the Personality Test. For others, the cycle will begin again: another attempt, another year of coaching, another postponement of careers and aspirations. More than five lakh candidates appeared for the Preliminary Examination this year; only a small fraction will enter the civil services. This funnel of talent should prompt a larger question: are we testing the competencies required of a modern civil servant, or the ability to prepare for an extraordinarily vast examination? That question has acquired renewed relevance
as the debate over the Civil Services Aptitude Test, or CSAT, has recently resurfaced. Rajya Sabha MP and former Uttar Pradesh DGP Brij Lal has publicly described the paper as the “biggest barrier to diversity“ in the services, and has argued that it should be abolished or rationalised. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, which he chairs, has formally recommended a comprehensive review to rationalise the paper, including its syllabus and level of difficulty, supported by empirical analysis of candidate performance. The concern about fairness deserves attention, but the debate risks focusing on the wrong part of the problem. CSAT may be one of the least problematic elements of the present examination architecture. Logical reasoning, comprehension, numeracy, data interpretation and analytical ability are not irrelevant hurdles for a future civil servant; they are precisely the competencies a modern administrative system requires. The origins of CSAT make this point particularly well. Back in 2001, the Civil Services Examination Review Committee chaired by economist Y.K. Alagh argued that re-examining candidates in subjects they had already studied at university was of “doubtful utility”; what mattered was the relevance of what was tested to the requirements of the civil service in a changing environment. A decade later, CSAT was introduced in 2011 to replace the optional subject paper in the Preliminary Examination. It was subsequently made a qualifying paper in 2015 following sustained protests and political controversy. The irony is that we may now be debating whether to dilute the very component that moved the examination, however imperfectly, towards aptitude-based assessment. The more important question is why such competencies remain at the margins of the examination rather than at its centre. Difficulty is not the fundamental problem: a difficult examination is legitimate if it reliably measures the abilities it claims to measure. The greater concern is that parts of the examination have become excessively broad, unpredictable and dependent on factual recall. Aspirants must master an enormous universe of information, which creates incentives to memorise rather than analyse. This is striking against the direction of India’s own education policy. The National Education Policy 2020 emphasises moving away from rote learning towards conceptual understanding, critical thinking, problem-solving and competency-based assessment. Mission Karmayogi, meanwhile, seeks to map roles, activities and competencies for government officials through the Framework of Roles, Activities and Competencies. Yet the examination that determines who enters government remains only loosely connected to such frameworks. India should therefore move towards a scientifically designed, competency-based civil-services examination. This does not mean putting the examination on a computer; digitising an old paper is not reform. What is required is better assessment science: calibrated question banks testing analytical reasoning, comprehension, quantitative ability, data interpretation, situational judgement, structured problem-solving and realistic administrative case studies. The second major reform should be to reconsider the optional-subject system in the Main Examination. The logic behind the move towards aptitude testing raises a question here too: if universities have already tested candidates in their specialised subjects, why should the civil-services examination replicate that through two optional papers? It is difficult to justify a recruitment process in which one candidate is assessed through literature, another through physics, another through political science, while all compete for the same administrative positions. Differences in optional-subject success rates, combined with the coaching industry’s focus on “scoring” subjects, add an unnecessary element of arbitrariness. A common assessment of applied governance, public policy, reasoning and problem-solving would provide a far more comparable basis for selection. Some State Public Service Commissions have already moved away from the optional-subject model, offering useful precedents for reconsidering the system at the Union level. Domain expertise matters—but it should be assessed where it is actually relevant. That points to a third reform: greater service-specific recruitment. The competencies required of an Indian Foreign Service officer are not those of a police officer, tax administrator, economic administrator or technical regulator. Why, then, should one largely horizontal examination determine entry into all these professions? India could retain a common national aptitude and competency assessment, with service-specific assessments thereafter. Candidates aspiring to diplomacy could be tested on international affairs and negotiation; those entering policing, on leadership, law and public order; technical and economic services could incorporate appropriate domain competencies. Such a system would allow India to recruit both capable generalists and candidates with specialised aptitude. The fourth reform concerns the all-or-nothing nature of the present system. Thousands of young Indians spend years preparing, often making repeated attempts, sustaining a vast coaching ecosystem at substantial opportunity cost. We must reconsider whether the present limits on age and attempts are too expansive, when they allow aspirants to remain trapped in the cycle for years. What begins as an effort to enter public service can become an all-consuming pursuit—almost an addiction to the examination itself, sustained by the hope that the next attempt will bring success. This is neither healthy for young people nor optimal for a country that loses years of productive talent to the preparation cycle. At the same time, a strong but unsuccessful candidate should not emerge with nothing to show for years of demonstrated ability. UPSC performance could be recognised by universities and public-policy institutions for admission to relevant Master’s programmes, fellowships or other opportunities, turning an all-or-nothing competition into a broader pipeline of public-policy talent. Finally, the examination must become more authentically Indian in its intellectual foundations. The decolonisation of civil-services matters because an Indian civil servant should have a substantive understanding of India’s civilisational history, constitutional traditions, diverse social realities and traditions of governance. These are not merely subjects to be memorised; they should inform how candidates understand Indian society, the state and public service. None of this requires abandoning what works. The UPSC has developed real institutional strengths over decades, and has shown impressive capacity to conduct a fiercely competitive national examination at enormous scale. The task now is to ensure the substance of the assessment keeps pace with the changing demands of the Indian state. The goal should not be to make the Civil Services Examination easier. It should be to make it better. For a country pursuing rapid economic growth, technological transformation and a larger global role, civil servants need more than the ability to remember large quantities of information. They need judgement, analytical ability, quantitative and technological literacy, problem-solving skills, domain understanding and the capacity to apply knowledge to complex real-world situations. The vision of Viksit Bharat @2047 therefore demands a corresponding transformation in how India recruits those who will help realise it. Better training can improve existing officers; better institutions can improve organisational performance. But the most fundamental question comes first: whom are we selecting to serve the Indian state, and how are we selecting them? The road to administrative reform, in other words, begins not at the end of a civil servant’s career, but at the examination hall where that career begins. Kamal Madishetty is an Assistant Professor at Rishihood University and a Visiting Fellow at the India Foundation, New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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