The UPSC Craze and Coaching Industry in India
Questioner: Namaste sir, recently the entire nation was shaken by the loss of three UPSC aspirants in New Delhi, and this heartbreaking incident had sparked some debates regarding the kind of situations these students live in and the kind of dingy conditions they have to face and sometimes, these students keep on preparing for these exams for years, maybe half a decade, at a length.
So, a lot of discussion has been happening around the outside conditions, but I wanted you to share some insights regarding, what goes on inside that makes them take such decisions and live in such kind of conditions?
Acharya Prashant: It’s the cultural thing, you see. This is a phenomenon pretty unique to India. In no other country of the world, big or small, developed or developing, do we see such a fascination for government service, bureaucratic job? There are two things at play here; there is a push factor; the push comes from the culture. The culture says, “Life is meant to be a secure affair, life is meant to be a bargain where you maximize the output of pleasure, power, prestige with the minimum kind of input of effort.”
Now, this kind of a scenario appears possible in a bureaucratic job. It might not actually be possible, but it is thought of as a possibility. The young candidate is, first of all, indoctrinated into thinking that life has to be spent according to certain rules, and the fundamental rule is, maximize pleasure with the minimum input of effort possible. That’s the cultural thing he carries since his childhood. This cultural aspiration seems possible in the bureaucratic job. So, that’s the push thing. You’re pushed from behind. Sometimes, you might actually be literally pushed from the behind by your family to go and prepare for the civil services examination.
And then, there is the pull thing. The pull thing comes from the coaching industry. So, you would know that the number of candidates has actually more than doubled over the last ten years, even though the number of vacancies; the seats in the CSE, have remained much the same. How did that happen? How did the number of applicants double within ten years? Doesn’t appear very logical or natural. Something is at work, something is amplifying and distorting the curve. What is it?
Huge amounts are spent into luring the candidates; not even the candidates, luring young people into becoming candidates. Without the kind of glamour and glitz that is displayed by the coaching industry, a lot of students wouldn’t have bothered to apply for the UPSC thing. So, that too has been attempted to be made into some kind of a culture. The IAS dream is all over the social media. Money is being put into promotion through all kinds of channels possible, print, TV, digital, everything, even movies. Even movies, money is being put into it so that it takes the shape of a crazy hype.
And when there is push and there is pull, who is a mere unemployed young person to resist? He finds himself helplessly carried to the lanes of Mukherjee Nagar and Rajendar Nagar and those places and he has come there as a beginner, as a struggler, as a beggar asking for job, help, favors, think of it.
Therefore, he can be exploited. Don’t we say, “Beggars can’t be choosers?” Therefore, he can be exploited. The kind of money that the coaching industry fleeces, the kind of rentals that you have there; where even a small dingy room in some basement can cost you 10K, 20K, 25k, that’s sheer extortion. And we are yet not talking of the fees that these institutes, and the food expenses. We are not yet talking of all that.
Extortion is possible only when one party is made to feel choiceless, helpless, optionless, no? Otherwise, you cannot extort. You go and arm twist someone, if he has an option, he will run away. Blackmail is possible only when the other party is left without an option. Who takes away the options? The options are taken away by the cultural conditioning. Otherwise, options exist.
So much money a candidate spends there, five lakhs, ten lakhs, twenty lakhs, sometimes more than that. A great option is to utilize that money elsewhere and make a career out of it. But the fellow will not utilize that money there; that option has been culturally taken away from him. Therefore, he feels, “This is the only route possible for me. Either this or nothing.”
And when the fellow says, “Either this or nothing,” that is taken as bravado, that is taken as an expression of courage. There are forces at work that want you to believe that you are in some kind of holy war, if you are preparing for UPSC. They’ll give you everything that you would normally find in religious imagery and discourse, deities, songs, heroes, folklore, legend, and a hope of afterlife. If you cross over, there is the eternal heaven waiting for you and the requirement for tapasya.
Don’t you see it’s so very religious? You have deities, you have priests in the form of the coaching teachers, and the ultimate reward is swarga or heaven, for which you must be prepared to do tapasya over at least five, ten years. And once you reach heaven, you are guaranteed lot of milk, honey and women. Look at even the movies that they make! And if the reward is so great, why can’t you pay handsome guru-dakshina to the priest?
So, it’s an entire mental environment that has been created. The youth are being caged in a bubble, it’s a mental thing. People slip into depression; they suffer all kinds of humiliation in this process of preparation for a government job. Still, they don’t opt out. Why? Because they have been told that there is no other option. They have been told that this is kind of a religious duty, something you cannot abstain from. So, you must continue in spite of all the failures.
Even if life is continuously telling you, “You are not cut out for this thing,” still, you must persist. So, the old norms, cultural values combined with the blitz of the crores spent into advertisements, all this is making the applicants accept sub-human conditions for continuous years.
They say, “We are prepared to live in these dingy rooms.” One poor student, unfortunately, even got electrocuted. Think of the living conditions. But they are agreeable to all the humiliating terms. Why? Anything for heaven, anything for heaven. Won’t you accept anything for heaven? They have been shown a heaven. It’s an illusion, obviously, but it’s an illusion that they have been made to believe in. And for that illusion they will suffer anything. That’s what is happening.
How can you have ten-lakh people applying for a thousand or so seats? Come on, having passed through that thing myself, I very well know that the real competition is actually only between five-thousand to ten-thousand students. My time, there were hardly three-hundred, four-hundred seats available, and we used to discuss that there is no need to be overwhelmed by the number of applicants because the number of serious contenders is hardly a few thousands. That’s where the real competition is.
Others are there just to make up the numbers. Why are these others wasting their life? Don’t they have the inner honesty to see that they don’t stand a chance? But they are being continuously fed a diet of hope. And when it comes to heaven, as the prospective reward, even a little hope suffices, no? The reward is so big that even if there is a 0.00001% chance, you still want to hang on.
If they could see that there is no heaven at stake, that there are more promising, more fulfilling alternate routes possible, then they would not needlessly invest themselves so deeply and for so long at those places, Mukherjee Nagar and all. I always say, “Try for two years and then look somewhere else. Two attempts are more than sufficient if you have honestly prepared.”
Ninety-eight percent of the candidates or maybe more than ninety-eight percent should actually never have been candidates. They have been turned into candidates just to fatten the pockets of coaching institutes. Before I decide to invest five-ten years of my life into something, shouldn’t I first of all ask myself, “Am I attitudinally, aptitudinally even cut out for this?”
Or, if I don’t say have the aptitude, “Do I have any worthwhile motivation, reason to try for this?” Because sometimes, it is possible to not have the aptitude and yet you work your way through the exam, it’s possible. But that much effort, if you want to put in, first of all, there has to be a strong and worthwhile reason. Those who are spending their lives there, do they have a worthwhile reason? There is no reason except the cultural push and the glamorous pull. There is no real reason.
And if those places continue to be flooded; first of all, with aspirants and later with water, then the coaching institutes would continue to have a feast. In a transaction, when all the power lies only with one party and the other party is continuously feeling helpless, then obviously you know what the terms of the agreement would be like, they would be loaded against the second party, no?
The student comes there feeling that, “If I do not get selected, that is the end of life for me.” He has been made to feel like that. Continuous glamorization of the civil services, mostly by the coaching institutes. The extent to which they go to create the impression that IAS is the real deal, the big apple, how will we innovate, how will there be any entrepreneurship if the youth of this country is spending its prime years, its golden time just running after a government job?
And things will continue to be this way unless there is a cultural redressal. Don’t you see there are states in the country that do not opt so much for the civil services, it’s a cultural thing. It’s mostly the poor and uneducated places where the praise, the hype, the whole idea of government job rules the roost.
Questioner: It almost looks like a lottery for them that the rest of their life that they have lived they were poor and one day, they’ll get that job and then they’ll be....
Acharya Prashant: Yeah, but if I love my life and I’m a reasonable fellow, I’m not going to bet my life on a lottery. I’m not going to do that, would I? Won’t do that.
Think of a scenario where you are supposed to bet on a roll of dice, and 1/6 is the chance that you get a million dollars, and 5/6 is the chance that you have to literally bite the bullet. Would you opt for it if you really love your life? If you want to throw it away, then that’s another matter.
The probability has to be rationally assessed. The probability, I understand, is never zero, and all the motivators play on that non-zero figure. Even if you have been extremely mediocre as a student all your life, the probability of your selection is never exactly zero. The probability is always non-zero, just that the nonzero figure could be one in ten million. But still, it’s non-zero.
So, that can be used to keep hope alive within you. You see, there is still a small positive probability of your success, so keep trying. So, first of all, a lot of hope is given. Then there is the push. And then there is also third thing, you are never allowed to realize the exact probability of your success. Nobody comes and tells you the exact number, one in ten million. Nobody tells you that.
You are made to believe that it’s probably one in one-thousand and one upon one-thousand is thousands of times better than one upon ten-million. And not only is the probability not allowed to be seen how low it is, also what you’re not allowed to see is the cost and the opportunity cost. You just don’t see how much money you are really investing in the process, and you do not see what returns could have been availed from the same amount, had you invested them in a worthier place.
I’ve remained in touch with that ecosystem for several years, so I know students come from very underprivileged areas, and sometimes their parents sell their little pieces of land just so that their son can avail coaching services in Delhi. Over the years, even the little ancestral hut is sold off so that the coaching fees can be paid. There is no problem selling off everything, the question is, for what? For what? Has there been a rational assessment, or is it just a blind craze?
The thing is very simple, you see. Wherever demand exceeds the supply, the supplier becomes very dominant and starts dictating the terms, does he not? So, these are small areas, Mukherjee Nagar, etc., it’s small in comparison to the size of the city. And if too many candidates swarm that place, what will happen to the rentals? The owners will arbitrarily hike the rentals, and that’s what is happening there.
In small, crowded places, the coaching shops will run their business, and nobody can come and complain or demand better conditions because it’s a supplier’s market. The demand has been artificially inflated, you see. When there is so much demand, who can ask the supplier to behave himself? Can you? So, the supplier misbehaves, and the supplier smiles because the demand has been artificially created by the supplier himself. Much of this is a phenomenon of the last ten years since the advent of social media. Social media has meant that the entire IAS hype has gone over the roof.
Coaching centers, as we said, are temples, and coaching teachers are the priests, and they are being worshiped. Freedom and inclination to run risks, if these things are not found in the youth of a country, there will be no innovation, no creativity, no real progress. It’s not without reason that China’s GDP is six times today that of India’s. Not that I’m taking the GDP as some holy metric, but for whatever its worth, for whatever it measures, it’s six times. There is a reason.
Just till a few decades back, India’s GDP was pretty much comparable to China’s. Today, they are six times ahead of us. How did that happen? Well, one of the indicators is, they don’t have such fascination for a bureaucratic job, and also, nothing called a coaching industry exists in China. There is nothing called that, a coaching industry. In fact, this kind of an industry does not exist anywhere except in India, not even in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Small centers for career counseling and test preparation are one thing, and a full-fledged City like Kota is another thing. It’s an entirely different dimension.
I strongly feel the number of attempts must be restricted. Also, the upper age limit must be set with discretion. You cannot allow people to continue taking the exam right into their thirties, mid-thirties, and in some cases, even into their forties, you cannot allow that. What are you doing to the youth of this country?
Questioner: They are no more the youth then.
Acharya Prashant: They are no more the youth, in fact. Oh, I read of a very, very curious case-I don’t know whether somebody played a prank or something. A father and his son were taking the exam together in the same hall, the UPSC one. The son was twenty-one, the father was forty something and they were both attempting the examination. Obviously, both of them failed it. It runs in the family. What kind of joke is this?
But the government has a stake in letting this happen. Otherwise, the government would become accountable. Jobs will need to be provided, if not jobs, then at least an environment conducive to entrepreneurship will need to be created. So, the government is very happy.
The entire young section of the population; full of energy, is busy just squandering its years preparing for a particular examination and they will not rise to assert themselves to demand their rights. And by the time they are through with the process, they are spent, old, and without any spunk. So, there is now no danger from them.
Are you getting it?
This is a tremendous national loss. I have said that often, tremendous national loss.
If someone could sit down and calculate the full extent of the loss that India is bearing due to this sarkari naukari phenomena, the figures would be staggering.
Anything more?
Questioner: This reminded me of a statistic that forty-five percent of all the graduates in the country, which are below the age of twenty-five, are not a part of the workforce. Probably, they are preparing for the exams.
Acharya Prashant: In India, we are never unemployed; we are students; even thirty-five years old that fellow is calling himself, “Oh, I am a student of UPSC.” Sir, you are a thirty-five years old unemployed person, why are you deceiving yourself? Why to hide your own reality? Continuously, they call themselves students. They’re not students. The fact is, they are applicants, they are competitors.
You are a student when you are enrolled in a college or a school or a university. Here, you have come to compete; it’s an entrance examination. Why are you calling yourself a student? Just so that the fact of their unemployment can remain hidden? Just so that they can convince themselves that they are still into some productive pursuit? “You know, I’m a student, I’m studying, don’t say I am worthless, I’m a student.” And it becomes a vicious cycle.
Having invested five years, you say, “Now that I have invested five years, how do I waste these five years? Let me try for another two.” It takes a lot of heart to accept something as a sunk cost. Mostly people don’t display such heart. You have heard of that right, “The bad note pushes the good note out of circulation.” Once you have done something that you should not have done, you develop stakes in continuing to do it. That’s why I say, “Get into it if you have to, and get out exactly as the calendar strikes two years. If you don’t get out, then probably you will never be able to get out.”
Give it everything that you have. Two years is a very long period. For two years, invest yourself, immerse yourself with all dedication. And if you don’t find your name in the list even after two attempts, bravely and gracefully just bow out. Otherwise, after two years, it will become difficult; after three years, it will become even more difficult; after five years, after ten years, he will say, “Even if all my attempts are exhausted, I’ll continue to reside in this place.” They’ll join a coaching center as a teacher or something and become a superstar.
Questioner: Bigger than actual IAS officers.
Acharya Prashant: Yeah, more fame and more celebrity than actual IAS officers, yeah.
Questioner: They try to preach like a priest.
Acharya Prashant: So, you see, the script is ready; we already know in advance. If we already know in advance, we better exercise the safeguards. It’s a decent job, especially the IAS option, no denying it’s a decent job, but it’s not so great that you take your life for it. Two years is what the whole pursuit deserves and not anything more than that. Life is far too big to be wasted in just one direction, one pursuit. You must know what you want from life, and you will find out a way. There is no one particular single way; there are many ways to live a fulfilling life and do good in your career.
Questioner: Sir, on social media the image of a heaven is being created. But actually, it is not a heaven. The amount of effort that is needed to qualify for the exam, to clear the exam, there are many other things they can easily achieve, that are better.
Acharya Prashant: Yes.
Questioner: In terms of their financial achievements also.
Acharya Prashant: You’re very right. See, that’s the thing with conditioning: it makes you unreasonable. Once you have been conditioned to go after something, you lose your logic; your calculations become blurred. You just cannot see what you are gaining and how much you are losing. Very stupid things start appearing necessary, and very minuscule gains start appearing monumental. So, the whole calculation becomes very distorted.
You just don’t sit down and do a basic back-of-the-envelope calculation, how much am I putting in? What am I getting from this? And that’s a basic thing to do in life, no? Cost-benefit analysis, ROI, whatever you call it. Nobody does that ROI in Mukherjee Nagar, I suppose.
Always be very cautious of anything that makes you suspend your rationality. That’s what happens in the sway of conditioning or when you are in the influence of strong emotion. Have you seen, how your reason goes for a toss? How you cannot think properly? How you cannot calculate where your benefits are? Have you seen that? Those spells of passion, when they capture you, when you are hypnotized, you lose the capacity to think clearly. It’s a big loss.
The amount of money that goes into all this is tremendous, and apart from the money, what you’re losing is the golden years of your energy. You enter that place when you’re twenty-three or twenty-four, probably that’s a time when you can try, work, experiment, fail, retry, learn, so much is possible, and all that is just fritted away.
