Cracking the UPSC

It is a matter of great concern that Assam has been seriously lagging behind other states of the country in producing officers of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and the like. This newspaper, in its Saturday front page lead story, has given out certain statistics to prove this. According to the news story, of the 5,255 IAS officers selected in the country during 1951-2020, only about 1.1% were from Assam. The last time an Assam candidate made it to the IAS was Aranyak Saikia (2020). Given the fact that there are few officers from the state in IAS, Assam is heading towards a situation when there will soon be no ‘local’ Chief Secretary for a long period Paban Kumar Borthakur attains superannuation later this year. The next senior ‘local’ officer is Lamchonghoi Sweety Changsan (1994 batch). She apparently has less chance of becoming Chief Secretary because there are at least 14 IAS officers senior to her. The next ‘local’ IAS officer in the list is Varnali Deka (2009 batch), who is at least 30 steps behind Changsan, followed by Biswajit Pegu (also of 2009 batch). He is followed by Narayan Konwar (2010), Bikram Kairi (2014), Dibakar Nath (2017) and Aranyak Saikia (2020). In sharp contrast to Assam’s failure, there are at least two IAS officers hailing from Arunachal Pradesh – Joram Beda (2008) and Masanda Magdalin Pertin (2018) – serving in the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, two from Manipur (Oinam Sarankumar Singh, 2012, and Parikshit Thoudam, 2021), one from Sikkim (Megha Nidhi Dahal, 2015) and one from Nagaland (Swapneel Paul, 2018) serving in Assam. While Assam’s has been a poor show, neighbouring Meghalaya, which has a joint cadre with Assam, presently has at least five direct recruit IAS officers. One does not have to know rocket science to ascertain the serious lack of an environment in Assam to inspire young people to target the central civil services. The primary task of helping young people in career planning lies with teachers – be it at the high school, college or university level. Teachers across high schools, colleges and universities of Assam probably have poor understanding of their own role in shaping their students. Society too must be blamed. About the various students’ organizations, the least said is better. While student bodies should focus on the education and career of students, most such bodies spend their energy in agitations and festivals. IAS officers from Assam, and also those serving in the state too have a role to play.