A Mentor’s Take on India’s Economics Pipeline: Civil Services, Higher Education, and the Missing Middle
As economics graduates navigate higher studies and civil services, institutional gaps – rather than individual ability – determine outcomes
SDG 4: Quality Education
Ministry of Education
For most economics undergraduates in India, the post-college world quickly narrows into two dominant pathways outside of a management programme. One leads toward a master’s degree – often at institutions like the Delhi School of Economics or Jawaharlal Nehru University – promising academic depth, research careers, or policy roles. These programmes mark a sharp transition from textbook learning to formal, model-driven economic reasoning.
The other veers toward professional routes outside academia – most prominently civil services preparation, which offers direct entry into the state administration. Many students move sequentially, combining the two: attempt the civil services exam after completing a master’s.
While these routes serve different institutional needs – one feeding India’s research ecosystem, the other its administrative machinery – students experience them less as deliberate choices and more as parallel responses to uncertainty. For many, gaps in academic preparation, weak signals of readiness, and fast-moving selection systems leave little room for deliberate sequencing or course correction. A telling example is the mismatch in academic rigour: a master’s in economics from universities in non-metro locations is often less rigorous than a bachelor’s from metro-based, theory-intensive economics departments.
Gaurav Bansal, who holds a master’s degree in economics and teaches Indian economy to civil services aspirants at GS Score, has watched this fork in the road shape student choices long before they fully understand the trade-offs involved.
“Students are forced to choose between depth and direction very early,” he says. “And often without being adequately prepared for either.”
What is often framed as a matter of personal preference or merit is, in fact, a structural problem: the absence of a coherent middle layer in economics education that could support students regardless of whether they move toward advanced academic training, competitive examinations, or both.
From Textbooks to Theory: Where the Transition Breaks
Many students enter masters economics programmes having studied standard undergraduate texts, where coverage is prioritised over conceptual grounding. The transition into postgraduate economics is abrupt: abstract models, formal proofs, and mathematical reasoning replace descriptive exposition almost overnight.
“Students are suddenly told to think like economists,” Gaurav notes. “But they are seldom taught how economists think.”
The issue is not rigour itself, but the lack of continuity. Without bridge curricula or intermediate grounding, students from elite honours programmes cope better; others struggle quietly, often interpreting structural gaps as personal failure.
This rupture extends beyond the classroom. Fragmented preparation carries forward into every subsequent evaluative system students encounter.
“An integrative first-year course could change everything,” Gaurav argues. “Not to dilute rigour, but to make it intelligible.”
The UPSC Mirror: When Academic Training Misfires
The civil services examination exposes this misalignment in a different way. Unlike university assessments that reward mastery within a bounded syllabus, UPSC demands conceptual agility – linking economic theory to Indian institutions, policy trade-offs, and real-world constraints.
Gaurav’s own experience captures this tension. Trained at Delhi School of Economics, he was comfortable with mathematical and statistical models, yet economics became his weaker area in the UPSC.
“I was answering as if it were an MA exam,” he recalls, “but UPSC doesn’t want rigour and elegance, it wants relevance.”
This produces a counter-intuitive outcome: some students with only an undergraduate foundation find UPSC preparation more convenient than those with master’s degrees. The issue is not the quantity of knowledge, but the evaluation logic embedded in the exam.
“UPSC rewards synthesis, not specialisation,” Gaurav says. “That difference is rarely made explicit.”
Over time, this logic shapes cognition itself. Candidates learn to think in compressed, exam-legible frames rather than sustained analytical ones – because that is what repeated success rewards. The consequence is not just misalignment, but a quiet reshaping of how future administrators learn to reason about the economy.
Outcomes and Incentives: How Aspirants Adapt
Faced with this mismatch, students respond rationally. Many turn to coaching institutions that translate academic economics into exam-oriented logic. Others abandon economics altogether, opting for optional subjects perceived as more predictable and scoring. Over time, this reshapes who enters the civil services – not necessarily selecting for the strongest economic reasoning, but for those best able to decode the examination.
“The exam creates its own pedagogy,” Gaurav observes. “Students don’t study economics as a discipline; they study it as a strategy.”
Coaching institutions thus become informal intermediaries – partly correcting for what universities do not provide, while also narrowing the intellectual bandwidth of learning.
Gaurav’s own career trajectory reflects this logic – shaped less by deliberate design than by successive adaptations to institutional incentives.
A Career Shaped by Friction, Not Design
After struggling with economics during UPSC attempts – despite performing strongly in other subjects – Gaurav explored writing and journalism, before joining Oxford University Press. Passion for economics eventually led him toward teaching, where he has now spent nearly a decade.
From today’s vantage point, however, he sees the vulnerabilities embedded in such paths – years of preparation with uncertain outcomes, especially for students without much financial buffers.
“Students often hold up long paths like the civil services without fully reckoning with the risks,” he reflects. “If it doesn’t work out, one just keeps moving to the next option that feels viable.”
The Coaching Industry: Discipline, Platforms, and Behaviour
To understand how students adapt to these pressures in practice, it helps to look at how the coaching ecosystem responds to the incentives created by the civil services examination. Coaching sits at the intersection of exam design, student behaviour, and learning practices.
Over the past decade, this ecosystem has shifted rapidly toward online platforms. Access has expanded, but learning has become more self-directed.
“Offline classrooms induce rhythm,” Gaurav notes. “Online learning gives flexibility, but also excuses.”
This shift has behavioural consequences. Students stack vast amounts of content but struggle with consolidation and revision. Platforms are rewarded for scale and visibility, not learning outcomes.
Coaching institutions adapt accordingly. Success rates drive enrolments; exam alignment trumps conceptual depth. Pedagogy is shaped less by what students need to learn, and more by what the exam appears to reward.
State governments have entered this space too by supporting regional aspirants – who migrate to coaching hubs like Delhi and Chennai – through subsidised housing and logistics. While well-intentioned, such interventions often replicate the same exam-centric logic.
“The state rarely asks how students actually learn,” Gaurav cautions. “Yet learning quality is where policy ultimately succeeds or fails.”
Returning to Policy: Fixing the Missing Middle
If India wants a more robust pipeline of economists, administrators, and policy thinkers, reform must look beyond endpoints like elite institutions or high-stakes examinations. The real leverage lies in the middle. Undergraduate-to-postgraduate transitions need structured bridge programmes that explicitly teach economic reasoning, not just content. Competitive examinations must communicate expectations more clearly, rewarding applied understanding without penalising conceptual depth. Public investment in coaching should be tied to pedagogical standards and learning design, not merely access or enrolment.
“The system has to start from how people actually learn, not how we wish they learned,” Gaurav says.
At stake is not only individual career risk, but the cognitive frameworks future administrators carry into governance, researchers into knowledge creation, and professionals into solving grounded problems. Systems that reward strategy over understanding ultimately shape how markets, welfare, and the state itself are imagined.
Gaurav Bansal is a Faculty for Indian Economy at the GS Score, a Civil Services Coaching Institute. The details presented here are based on his account, reflect his personal views, and have been approved for publication. This piece was prepared with assistance from Yashita Jain, a member of the editorial team at The Policy Edge.