Bureaucracy Vs Politics
Last updated
Last updated
Sanjeev Sanyal is an Indian economist, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India has commented there's a poverty of aspiration amongst Indian youth.
His statements:
"I'm not saying you don't want people to take the exam. Yes, every country needs a bureaucracy, that's perfectly fine. But I think lakhs of people spending their best years trying to crack an exam where a tiny number of a few 1000 people actually want to get in, makes no sense.
If they put the same energy into doing something else, we would be winning more Olympic gold medals, we'd be seeing better movies being made, we'd see better doctors, we would see more entrepreneurs, scientists and so on. So I would say that it's (UPSC is) a waste of time."
I came across this few days ago and started wondering, let's try this comparison on some dataset. I decided to comparare Bureaucracy with its closest ally Politics. So following 4 types of datasets are considered:
UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) CSE 2023: Total aspirants & Total Seats
OPSC (Odisha Public Service Commission) 2021: Total aspirants & Total Seats
Lok Sabha 2019: Contesting Candidates & Total Seats
Odisha Assembly Election 2019: Contesting Candidates & Total Seats
This goes as below:
Ironically, there's a higher chances of success (6.74% & 13.04%) if any person filed for nomination as MP or MLA candidate (Odisha) in 2019 Indian General Election.
While, the bureaucratic pathway is quite crowded with roughly 0.09% & 0.62% in UPSC CSE 2023 & OPSC 2021 as an example.
The idea of this quick brief visualization is to draw a data driven reference point of true competition in India.
Event
Total Seats
Contesting Candidates
Average Candidates Per Seat
Success Chance (%)
UPSC CSE 2023
1,255
1,300,000
1,035.85
0.09%
OPSC 2021
392
63,222
161.28
0.62%
LOK SABHA 2019
543
8,054
14.83
6.74%
ODISHA ASSEMBLY ELECTION 2019
147
1,127
7.66
13.04%