Every year, hundreds of thousands of Indians sit for the civil services examination, widely regarded as one of the world's most gruelling competitive tests. After navigating multiple stages of selection across months, a minuscule fraction secure positions as India's top bureacrats. Their victories dominate newspaper front pages and breakfast table conversations, with fathers reading accounts to their children as inspiration. Yet the narrative that captures national attention deliberately sidelines a much larger reality: the 99 percent who fail, whose years of preparation, sacrifice and emotional toll remain unacknowledged by the same media celebrating the selected few.
One such story belongs to an aspirant who faced a reckoning after three consecutive attempts at the Mains examination in 2023, 2024 and 2025, only to fail to clear the Prelims stage this year for the first time.
