Examinations

My Instagram feed especially has been flooded with promising young people who dedicated their time, energy and finances to preparing and appearing in exams like the CBSE boards, NEET UG and most recently the UPSC’s CSE Prelims. Most of these candidates on reels were spending time proving their worth with mock test scores, clean track records and demanding accountability from apex educational boards such as the National Testing Agency (NTA) for assessment gaps. The situation has escalated to the Supreme Court, which is headed by the very Chief Justice of India who accused youngsters of not getting employment because they don’t have a place in professions.

This is quite ironic to hear, especially since 5.94 lakh people wrote the CSE prelims exam this year, seeking eventual employment in the Indian civil services, competing for 933 openings. Some of these candidates have spent anywhere between 2 and sometimes 8 years in preparation and attempts for a job, with a recorded 0.53% success rate since 1947. In the opinions of many of my elders, the job security and perks received by government officials are still not at par with what corporate jobs have to offer the general workforce.

One such candidate was a close friend of mine, who was attempting this exam for the very first time. My friend comes under the Persons with Disabilities (PwD) quota, who, having chosen the exam centre in the city they reside in, still had to take a 14 to 15-kilometre journey during this merciless summer to attempt the prelims. The majority of candidates in this centre were PwDs, with guardians accompanying them for assistance. Yet, this was the worst place that could have been chosen for the conduct of exams for anyone, as it had crumbling infrastructure, no ramps or elevators, broken stairs, and a lack of waiting areas for guardians, just to name a few. The tables were designed for able-bodied candidates, and PwDs had to plead with centre heads to permit use of personal planks, tables and ramps. What enrages me the most, based on the firsthand account shared by my friend, was the denial of basic dignity to those writing exams, often expected to simply adjust to everything.

The unnecessary abstraction of questions in the general studies paper, defying its own structure in terms of weightage of areas within the syllabus (such as current affairs, polity and history), is clear proof that UPSC has held on to making CSE Prelims an elimination test and not one that assesses candidates as future public administrators and policymakers.

I recall someone justifying this practice, claiming that civil servants must be generalists and not specialists, as they would need to adapt to the various ministries they would be posted in. This is the very reason policies are designed to alienate beneficiaries from the benefits they can avail, especially by someone who clearly has not spent enough time on the ground looking at the peculiarities of these issues for a longitudinal period, as it isn’t a mere data point; it is a lived reality awaiting reform. Yet, our country contests the lateral entry of specialists to work on policies and committees that the larger government and bureaucracy are ill-equipped to work on. The Indian inertia from peons to the parliament has become the defining feature of uncontested compliance to a system that fails us day and day out.

Employment

The Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) for persons of age 15 years and above was observed as 59.3% during 2025. The headcount in the technology services sector could go down from 7.5 to 8 million in 2023 to 6 million by 2031, a pinch many have already started facing. Out of the 21,500 students registered for campus placements at Indian Institute for Technology (IIT) branches in 2024, only 13,410 secured jobs, leaving 8,090 students still searching for employment. If this is the state of employment for the crème de la crème of educational institutions in the country, it is not difficult to picture the fate of those in other non-technical sectors. Many existing workers are being pushed to collect egocentric data to train AI to replace them, sparing no spectrum of work, whether menial or skilled. Many despondent youth like myself dream of earning in a currency with a higher forex value than the dropping INR without being micromanaged and in a time before the “creative destruction” AI brought about to many creative roles, we harbored dreams of freelancing and moving about as digital nomads (a dream crushed by the current civic perception of Indians, thereby reducing international mobility for many), doors that were once opened for us are being shut in our face.

My LinkedIn account at one point kept suggesting roles to train AI on expertise in Political Science and History, especially by Mercor AI, which has seven class action lawsuits against it due to a breach in data and leakage of job interviews and sensitive data. My personal trials and tribulations with job interviews and responses have been extremely frustrating, just like many others currently job-hunting. Most organizations no longer have the decency to send a rejection email, most job postings are either already filled through internal hiring or ghost postings to avoid taxes and the ones that finally call upon me for interviews either, a) Expect me to have industry knowledge without the exposure which an entry level job must offer, b) Perform the duties of a full time employee within the designation of an intern earning 1/5th of the pay and gain necessary experience which of course, does not count as experience in professional terms on your resume (something I have learnt after undertaking 7 unpaid internships in the past and one paid role which was outside of my industry).

The part that baffles me most is how none of the organisations ever offer initial mentorship, something that was a common practice when millennials entered the workforce. Layoffs have hit roles in mentoring substantially. Assessments I undertook were proctored by AI, and I have read about ample instances of AI taking interviews for roles as well, wherein they get stuck on questions candidates cannot answer as an elimination tactic. At such a stage, of course, people would look into job security and fight hard for a government job role that promises stability unlike the IT and corporate sector at large post liberalisation.

What is the way forward?

The problems I talked about are common knowledge for most people my age, but I really want to talk about a few solutions that make sense in my head, and since this is my blog and not a research journal, I will leave it up to your imagination for this to make/not make sense. I think it is time we learn how to lobby for our demands from the grassroot level: find a cause close to you that you would work on irrespective of its economic benefit to you, look at the hierarchy from the bottom up and start engaging with the state departments and local MLAs because what hurts us the most is our blind compliance due to fear of retaliation when accountability is concerned. Starting small helps; understanding which NGOs in your vicinity work on the said cause can help you in getting resources (research, contacts, and maybe even a seat at the table to put up your cause), but you of course have to be ready to be disappointed further because lobbying is not easy, yet creating those contacts definitely helps.

In terms of structural reform, I would change the paradigm of examinations to fit the current reality and changes the country seeks from public administrators, expanding vacancies to allow more lateral entries but within a larger bandwagon wherein the expertise is interchangeable and useful. For instance, I would club the following Ministries: Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and Labour and Employment together such that the skills and knowledge gained by working in one of these is transferable to the other to identify and execute better practices rather than aimlessly shifting a bureaucrat from Minority Affairs to Heavy Industries. Governmental vacancies should be opened up beyond the minuscule hiring of Young Professionals (YPs) and senior consultants. This is a very primitively formed idea, and of course further available discourse might suggest better ideas and why my suggestion might falter, but if it is not obvious already, I am trying hard to muster optimism in a really discouraging environment for youth like myself.

No, I do not want to take another AI skill development course, or optimise my resume with special Claude prompts. I want to build welfare measures for people to meet their basic needs while getting paid fairly for my time at work. Is it too much to ask? Or perhaps I must display resilience like a cockroach?

Yet in such times I go back to this quote,

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

―Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Maybe we will be brave enough in due time, or maybe we are on the verge of a pushback. There are warning signs, but action awaits. Until then, so long.

My use of AI started when I was too afraid to approach a faculty member who taught research methodology back when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree. This person was the human embodiment of a chihuahua: tiny and unapproachable. He had some extreme methods to teach literature reviews to students. While most people thought his style of teaching was crisp, in my eyes, it was pure terror.

Catching up on coursework was tough, and GPTs entered the market at a time when I needed a learning aide. Even though they were recently launched and in a nascent stage of development, they made asking doubts and refining work a lot easier. Using Chat GPT for the first time felt like having a conversational version of Grammarly with the patience of an empathetic instructor.

But dependency is a slippery slope….and I slipped drastically to the point that I did not want to get back up. As much as I want to blame myself for overtly relying on these LLMs, might I add, deadline pressure does not work favourably for everyone. GPTs are like Google Maps. They can recenter you to walk through a river because it has cut down your travel time by 5 minutes, and not inform you about a closed turning because you hate hearing about hurdles. Slander aside, it’s a good tool that does not need to interfere with every field or task to ‘streamline’ work.

As a serial GPT user going into recovery, my first order of business has been to identify my writing style, for which I went through a notebook where I used to write poems. I haven’t expanded my vocabulary in this way in years….I mean, what was the need of using taciturn or pandemonium on those poorly rhymed poems anyway? I used to thumb through the dictionary to find words for rhyming, which made me conclude that I am not different from an AI model after all, because I can put it to shame in terms of using tantalising phrases in the worst possible context.

I like how human mediocrity has gotten much-needed appreciation by mainstream media, all thanks to tiresome AI slop flooding our feeds everywhere, whether it is advice posts on LinkedIn, prompts on dating apps being the same and those horrendous reels of vegetables in a soap opera, just to name a few. I don’t know if my poor style of writing will take me places, but it may bring me closer home to my younger self. That is perhaps a journey worth taking, even if out of a place of compulsion.

So, how do humans write today? This blog is an attempt to figure out an answer and establish a digital fingerprint of sorts that is unique to me, just without the pressure of academia and institutions falling upon me.