India’s toughest contest
Above: Govind Jaiswal, whose father (right) was a rickshaw driver, was successful candidate in the 2006 civil services exam. His coaching classes in Delhi were financed by the sale of family land. Photo: OutlookIndia
Hope and perseverance drive the enormous number of young Indians with ambitions to work in government, reports Kate Sullivan (of the Faculty of Asian Studies).
It’s a Saturday aItafternoon in early October and Prakash is taking me to his afternoon preparatory class at Vajiram & Ravi, one of the dozens of institutes in Delhi that train candidates for India’s civil services exams. Still buoyant despite two failed exam attempts, Prakash is heading for a class that prepares students for the optional paper in psychology he hopes to tackle next year. The classes last two and a half hours and run seven days a week for twenty weeks or more.
The classroom is already half full, with around 200 chairs crammed into a room that can’t be much more than fifty square metres. Once the students have manoeuvred their way into a chair, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to get out again until after the class. And it’s unlikely they’d want to. The scarcity of places and the high cost of the course spell a dropout rate of less than 1 per cent. Though October marks the tail end of the course, and several students are immersed elsewhere in preparation for the fast-approaching Mains exams, the room fills quickly. Prakash points out three girls – a doctor, an engineer and a journalist – sitting pressed up behind us.
Mukhul Pathak, a well-known psychology lecturer whose coaching successes have made his subject a popular choice for the optional paper, marches up to a narrow podium and begins his class. Within seconds he has the entire room in uproarious laughter. Dressed in a striped cream and peach short-sleeved shirt and moss-green corduroy trousers, energetic and humorous, he shows no trace of having taught this same course perhaps twice a year for the past fifteen years. On his wrist hangs a thick gold watch of proportions such that from the fifth row I can see that it runs ten minutes fast. He radiates commitment, efficiency and affluence …
Reprinted from Inside Story. Read the full article …