Sanjeev Sanyal warns again: ‘Brightest minds trapped in UPSC, coaching mafia selling them opium’

Economist and PM-EAC member Sanjeev Sanyal has slammed India’s civil services exam preparation culture, calling it a massive misallocation of talent perpetuated by a “coaching class mafia”. He said the UPSC exam system fails 99.9% of those who attempt it and questioned the logic of treating it as a primary life goal. 

“Now tell me how many things are there with a 99.9% failure rate that you would recommend somebody to do unless it has a very large payoff? That’s why I say people know why don’t you try to be Elon Musk or something,” he said in a podcast conversation with CA Kushal Lodha, adding, “But the point is if you’re going to take such a large risk – why become a bureaucrat.”

He clarified he wasn’t opposed to people who truly wanted to become civil servants but objected to the way aspirants are pushed into a years-long cycle. “There are people who have now become professional UPSC aspirants…they spend years and years doing it. I think it’s a complete waste of human resources.”

In late March 2024, the economist became one of the first prominent voices to call out the UPSC craze, warning that “way too many young kids who have so much energy are wasting their time trying to crack UPSC.” 

In his latest podcast, Sanyal argued that the brightest students are being pulled into this “trap”, not the mediocre ones. “It’s the supposedly talented guy in the class because this is the only guy the family will borrow, beg, and send them to live in Mukherji Nagar in Delhi. So we are taking the best people in our system and instead of putting them to some productive use, we are putting them where there is 99.9% failure rate.”

Calling out the coaching industry that profits from this, Sanyal said, “This rather ridiculous system (UPSC preparation) is perpetuated by a coaching class mafia, which basically sells opium to all these people. Imagine the product they’re selling – it’s a product that is going to fail you 99.9% of the time. And it’s worse than that, because even the 0.1% who get through are not all going to do exciting things in life.”

He added, “The odd person will go on to become whatever, cabinet secretary to the Government of India or something like that… The bulk of them will do mostly mundane things.”

Sanyal questioned why the same energy isn’t directed toward other competitive fields. “You can be a sportsperson, you can be a writer, you can be a poet, you can be a singer, you can be an entrepreneur. In fact, the success rates of entrepreneurs are much, much higher than 0.1%.”

Asked if similar logic applies to MBA entrance exams like CAT, where lakhs compete for a few hundred IIM seats, Sanyal responded, “Many of them get through to something else…I don’t think there is a large number of people who take CAT every year for five, six, and seven years. My problem is with this whole culture. I routinely meet some guy who I think is pretty bright, and I ask them – what are you doing? I’m an aspirant. Aspirant for what? UPSC. So my view is that you know that kind of being an aspirant is not aspirant at all. That’s hence the term you know – poverty of aspiration.”

On whether the Chartered Accountancy (CA) track — which also has a very low final success rate — fits the same category, Sanyal said the comparison does not hold. “Two to three years is perfectly fine. That’s even true for UPSC if that’s what you want to do in life. First of all, be clear you want to do that. In the case of chartered accountancy, the vast majority actually have an interest in the subject of accountancy or related subjects.”

He compared that with the UPSC obsession. “My experience is that UPSC giving is actually a culture now. Most of those people don’t actually want to be civil servants. If they actually showed them the life of a civil servant, they would not want to be there.”

He added, “One of the weird things is many of the people who get through the UPSC attempt to give this exam the following year again to get into some other service that they think is higher in the pecking order. So that tells me one thing – even the successful people are not happy. So they are now on the opium.”