{"id":42007,"date":"2025-07-28T06:39:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T06:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/42007\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T06:39:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T06:39:14","slug":"indias-puzzling-fix-for-the-civil-service-job-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/42007\/","title":{"rendered":"India\u2019s puzzling fix for the civil-service-job obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

What India is doing, will do, and should do\u2014to not just survive but thrive in the chaos unleashed by Trump. Subscribe here<\/a>\n <\/p>\n

Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%], <\/p>\n

You are reading our Premium subscriber-only newsletter Make India Competitive Again\u2014a weekly commentary on what India should do to thrive in the chaos unleashed by Trump <\/p>\n

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Do you think Agastya Sen, the pot-smoking, Marcus Aurelius-reading protagonist of English, August, would have even considered a career as a civil servant now? Not a chance. To his kind\u2014Sen is the son of a mandarin-turned-state governor and he has a Yale-alumnus friend\u2014working for the government is now as unimaginable as being part of a nonprofit focused on rural sanitation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even 20 years ago, when I was in college, a former bureaucrat asked why we should spend years trying to pass the notoriously hard civil-service exams when we could work just as hard to make it into an Indian Institute of Management. We would make more money than he could ever dream of, and, more importantly, we wouldn\u2019t be doing politicians\u2019\u00a0 bidding.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But implicit in that argument is privilege far beyond the vast majority of India\u2019s reach. Most desperately want a job. Any job. India\u2019s official unemployment rate in June is 5.6%, but to many experts, the number could well be imaginary. Seventeen of the 50 economists polled by news agency Reuters<\/a> pegged the jobless rate at between 7% and 35%.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing to me is really throwing dust in your eyes. You say this is the unemployment rate, the growth rate\u2014quite often, they don\u2019t make much sense. We have a massive employment problem and that is not reflected in the data,\u201d said Pranab Bardhan, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost Indian workers are underemployed. If you are able-bodied and you did not work for any time, not even one hour in the last six months, unless you are rich, how did you feed yourself? So you scrounge around and do something. And then you are employed. Now what does that employment mean?\u201d asked Bardhan.<\/p>\n

So it should surprise no one that the civil services, which include 20 streams, including local administration, policing, diplomacy, and revenue, are still coveted. In fact, too coveted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the decade up to FY23, the latest year for which data is available, the number of applicants for the preliminary exam more than doubled, to 1.1 million. But the number of applicants fighting for each vacancy almost tripled.<\/p>\n

\"Led<\/a><\/p>\n

The surge is startling, especially when the ranks of new college graduates only expanded 40% in roughly the same period.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Narendra Modi administration knows it can do nothing to dissuade the hordes of candidates. Many think, and rightly so, that being a public servant is their best shot at upward social and economic mobility. So the central government wants to give the applicants something more to look forward to than these few hundred jobs every year.<\/p>\n

\t\t <\/p>\n

Make India Competitive Again \u2022 EPISODE 16<\/p>\n

India\u2019s puzzling fix for the civil-service-job obsession<\/p>\n

\t\t It speaks to the perilous state of employment in the country <\/p>\n

Don’t have The Ken app? Install now<\/a><\/p>\n

Enter yet another state scheme with a tortured acronym: Pratibha Setu, or Professional Resource And Talent Integration\u2014Bridge for Hiring Aspirants. With this, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which conducts the Government of India\u2019s civil- and defence-service exams, wants other arms of the government and even private companies to hire the unsuccessful candidates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What India is doing, will do, and should do\u2014to not just survive but thrive in the chaos unleashed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[28,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-42007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}