The Centre on Tuesday debunked social media posts claiming that the recently concluded civil services prelims exam question paper was leaked as "fake".

In a post on X, the Press Information Bureau's Fact Check wing said that "several social media posts circulating online are alleging that the UPSC Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination, 2026 question paper was leaked".

"This claim is fake," it said, attaching a photo of a social media post by the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress party.

The civil services examination is conducted annually by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) in three stages -- preliminary, main and interview -- to select officers of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and Indian Police Service (IPS) among others.

The preliminary exam was held on May 24 and its result was announced on Monday.

"UPSC examination question papers are developed by experts in the relevant subjects selected from across India," the PIB Fact Check said.

"Please refrain from sharing misleading and unverified claims," it said, adding that "rely only on information obtained from official sources".

The PIB Fact Check also shared a link to a clarification given by an institute regarding the alleged leak.

"A claim has been circulating that Anantam IAS already had the UPSC civil services prelims 2026 questions -- or that the paper was leaked to us -- because some of our answer-key explanation articles showed a publish date from before the exam," said the clarification note, also put up on the institute's website.

"We want to address this head-on, because it is both serious and false," it said.

"Once the paper was in the public domain, our faculty did what we do every year: solved General Studies Paper-I, prepared a detailed answer key, and wrote a set of in-depth articles explaining each answer -- the concept behind it, the elimination logic, and the source," the institute said.

"That is a large amount of content. Publishing dozens of detailed explanations at once, all stamped with the same date and time, would have fired off a flood of push notifications and newsletter emails to our subscribers in a single burst -- and made the series hard to read in any sensible order.

"So we did something routine for a big content series: we backdated the publish dates of some (not all) of those articles so the explanations sat in a logical sequence and did not spam everyone on one day," it said.

The NSUI, through a social media post on Monday, had demanded that the matter related to the civil services prelims exam "be impartially investigated and the full truth brought before the nation".

"If 82 out of 100 questions come from the content of just one coaching institute, this is not mere coincidence but a matter warranting serious investigation. The youth want to know whether any injustice is being done alongside their years of hard work," it had said in the post on X in Hindi.