'Those seeking lateral entry...': IAS officer steps into Sanjeev Sanyal's 'UPSC is a waste of time' debate

Economist Sanjeev Sanyal's comments that 'UPSC is a waste of time' for lakhs of aspirants because fewer than 1 per cent make the cut has triggered a debate on social media. Sanyal, a Member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council (EAC-PM), recently said that many UPSC aspirants dream of becoming a joint secretary and if the same youth spent their effort on doing something else, India would benefit much more.

However, on Tuesday, an IAS officer appeared not very impressed with the argument and said: "I can assure that no one who competes in the UPSC exam dreams to become a Joint Secretary. On the other hand, those seeking lateral entry, definitely do." 

Somesh Upadhyay, currently Collector and DM of Odisha's Deogarh, however, did not mention whether his response was to Sanyal, who joined the central government in February 2017 as Principal Economic Advisor in the Ministry of Finance. In 2022, he was appointed as a Member of the EAC-PM.

While Somesh did not elaborate, he was referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's initiative of appointing domain specialists in bureaucracy from the private sectors. 

In February 2017, NITI Aayog in a report recommended for induction of personnel in the middle and senior management level in the government from the private sector. Based on this, the Centre decided to appoint outside experts to 10 positions of Joint Secretary and 40 positions at the Deputy Secretary/Director level.  

Replying to the IAS officer, a doctor, MD-Medicine in Raipur, said still there was no point in wasting precious years of life for getting into a government job, where scope of doing good is very limited. "99.99% of aspirants are non-employable in the corporate sector/private sector if they don't get through the exam as they don't," the doctor said. 

In a podcast 'The Neon Show' aired on March 22, Sanyal spoke on the 'poverty of aspiration' that India had suffered for decades. He said just like Bengal aspired to pseudo-intellectuals and union leaders, Bihar aspired to small-time local goon politicians. In an environment where those are the role models, he said, a person can either become a local goon, if he does not want to become a local goon, he knows his way out is to basically become civil servant. 

"Although it's better than being a goon, even that is a poverty of aspiration. I mean at the end of it, if you must dream, surely you should dream to be Elon Musk or Mukesh Ambani. Why do you dream to be joint secretary? You need to think about how a society thinks about risk taking and scale and so on. I think one of the problems of say a place like Bihar is not that it had bad leaders, the bad leaders are reflection of what that society aspires for. If you're aspiring for this, you will get it."

The economist said that young Indians should take UPSC exams only if they truly want to become an administrator. "I think what is happening, thankfully our aspirations are changing. I still think way too many young kids who have so much energy are wasting their time trying to crack the UPSC. I'm not saying you don't want people to take the exam. Yes, every country needs a bureaucracy. That's perfectly fine. But I think lakhs of people spending their best years trying to crack an exam, where a tiny number of few thousand people actually [are] going to get in, makes no sense. If they put the same energy into doing something else, we would be winning more Olympic gold medals, we would be seeing better movies being made, we would see better doctors, we would see more entrepreneurs and scientists and so on."

"I would say that same energy, put it into something else. I would say it's a waste of time. And I always discourage people unless they really want to be an administrator, they shouldn't take the UPS exam. Many of them after having gone through it, then they get frustrated through the course of their career. In the end, life in bureaucracy is not meant for everybody. And large parts of it, as with any profession, but large parts of it are largely dull and boring and about passing files up and down. Unless you really wanted to do it, you're not going to be particularly happy with it."