A return to the roots of a dream. This is how Bratati Dutta described the chance to address the gathering of aspirants at the inauguration of the new batch of Satyendra Nath Tagore Civil Services Study Centre’s composite course last Friday at the CII-Suresh Neotia Centre of Excellence for Leadership.
Bratati, now an assistant magistrate and assistant collector in Howrah, was one of the three successful alumni of the centre who were invited on the occasion, the others being Meghna Chakravorty, the state topper with all India rank 79 from the 2024 batch, and Md Burhan Zaman who has joined the Indian Defence Accounts Service and is posted in Calcutta as the assistant controller of defence accounts.
The fourth recent entrant to the IAS cadre on stage was Ankita Agarwal, who achieved the highest rank from Bengal in recent times — all India rank 2. The officer on special duty at the department of technical education, training and skill development was not an alumna of the centre but stays close by — at Kalindi, Lake Town.
“Don’t risk getting burnt out too fast by going too deep in the first few months. Take regular breaks, exercise, revel in the joy of learning. The results of this exam are uncertain. Enjoy topics that you are curious about without wasting too much time on them. And always have a Plan B if UPSC does not work out for you,” Ankita advised the aspirants. She had given herself a fixed number of years to try and crack the exam and she knew what she would do if she did not succeed. “That way one is not wracked by this paralysing fear.”
The other three also had words of advice to offer from their own experience of preparing for the UPSC examination.
Surajit Kar Purkayastha, the centre chairman, rued the dip in the civil services supply line from Bengal. “Earlier, many students entered the service from Presidency College, but not anymore. The ecosystem needs to change,” he said, sharing an account of a trip to College Street, the hub of second-hand books. “If one goes looking for books on IAS entrance, booksellers suggest getting books on WBCS instead. It is true that 12 lakh candidates apply for the exam, and about five lakh appear for it. But remember that serious contenders like yourselves number about 10 to 20,000. So don’t get perturbed by big numbers,” he urged the aspirants.
The centre, he emphasised, tried to get the best of faculty, pointing to Q.H. Khan, the managing director of Dhyeya IAS, a UPSC coaching institute based in Delhi with which the centre has partnered since 2024. “We provide academic support to the students here by sending teachers over,” Khan told The Telegraph Salt Lake.
Home secretary Nandini Chakravorty was the chief guest. Growing up, she recalled watching the serial Udaan on Doordarshan that centred around an idealistic IPS officer, played by Kavita Chowdhary, and Shekhar Kapur as the district magistrate. She pointed to the growth trajectory that a career in the civil services offered. “You are given the power to empower others. Civil services are the backbone of the country’s administration. By attempting to join, you are choosing to be a part of India’s journey to progress,” she said.
Course director of the centre Jitin Yadav shared his own UPSC story and advised the candidates to be clear about their motivation to join the services. “If it is making a reel on riding a car with a beacon, that motivation will not last more than a week,” he warned. In the mood of the moment, he ended by asking the auditorium full of students: “How’s the josh?”, aping Vicky Kaushal’s uniformed character in the film Uri, to which the audience responded lustily, as the soldiers in the film: “High, sir”.
This year, 72 students from the centre will write the Mains examination, scheduled from August 22.