Column | Aspiring to be Ambani or Musk

India's bureaucratic exam obsession was questioned by economist Sanjeev Sanyal, sparking a debate on aspirations and happiness beyond traditional career paths.

India’s steel frame is feeling rattled. Sanjeev Sanyal, economist, author and member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, recently said, while every country needs a bureaucracy, “lakhs of people are spending their best years trying to crack an exam where a tiny number of a few thousand people actually are going to get it”.

And when they do get it, large parts of the job are “dull and boring” because it is all “about passing files up and down”.

That has raised some civil servant hackles.

Yet, Sanyal is hardly the first to say this. In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s famous novel English, August, the young protagonist, Agastya, thinks he’s leaving his listless upper-class life for a more “meaningful context” when he joins the Civil Services. He is told by a mentor: “In my time I’d wanted to give this Civil Services exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L.H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.” But Agastya quickly finds his Civil Services life in the “real India” is a morass of mindless masturbation and marijuana.

Sanyal has been accused of elitism — dismissing the dreams of those from Tier II and Tier III towns where many civil servants come from these days. Sanyal has said he was not disparaging the service, just wondering whether it was worth spending the best years of one’s life doggedly trying to crack the examination, over and over again.

He called it a “poverty of aspiration” and wondered: “At the end of it, if you must dream, surely you should dream to be Elon Musk, or Mukesh Ambani, why did you dream to be Joint Secretary?”

Only Sir Humphrey Appleby, the bureaucrat of Yes Minister television serial fame, might have an answer to that. But what is interesting is how neatly the old holy trinity of the IAS officer, doctor and engineer has been replaced by new icons such as Elon Musk and Mukesh Ambani.