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⚖️ Polity & GovernanceMAINS · GS2.8 · GS1.2

A merit examination took 85 years to produce a majority-Indian service

UPSC turns 100 on 1 October. The exam opened to competition in 1855; Indians outnumbered Europeans in the ICS only in 1940, and the London centre closed only in 1979.

What happened

For Prelims

For UPSC: This is the institution the reader is sitting for, written as history with the dates attached - and it is the likeliest current-affairs anchor of the year for a constitutional bodies question. Use the article-wise table on UPSC's independence, the 1855-to-1940 arc on Indianisation of the services and the nationalist critique of the Lee Commission, and the 1950-51 recruitment figures against 2026 scale on the expansion of competitive access.
What it is NOT: The backgrounder gives no current vacancy, applicant or success-rate figures for the Civil Services Examination beyond the 5.50 lakh who sat the 2026 Preliminary, so the modern competition cannot be sized. It gives no data on the social composition of recent recruits, which is what "inclusion" in its subtitle would have to be measured by. It does not say how many of the Commission's recommendations have been rejected by government under Article 323, which is the one published measure of its advice being overruled. And it gives no figure for posts the Commission recruits to outside the Civil Services Examination.

For Mains

Syllabus: GS2.8 · GS1.2 · Linkage L1

Anchor
Open competition for the Indian Civil Service began in 1855. Indians outnumbered Europeans in that service for the first time in 1940 - 625 against 575. Eighty-five years. For most of them the examination was held only in London, in English, and tested Greek and Latin, and by 1919 just 78 of 1,255 officers were Indian. Merit was the principle from the start; access took nearly a century.
Substantiation (data)
The dates carry the argument. Satyendranath Tagore sailed in 1862 and joined in 1864. The maximum age was progressively cut from 23 to 19, leaving Indian candidates little time to prepare. The examination was first held in India at Allahabad in 1922 and moved to Delhi in 1928. The Commission itself was constituted on 1 October 1926 under rules framed in London, with a Chairman from the British Home Civil Service. The London centre was discontinued only in 1979.
Position
What the Constitution did to this body is the part worth defending. Articles 315 to 323 turned an advisory office appointed from London into a constitutional authority whose Members can be removed only by the President after a Supreme Court inquiry, whose expenses are charged on the Consolidated Fund, and whose rejected advice must be laid before Parliament with reasons. Rajendra Prasad named the purpose plainly in 1949: to guard against jobbery, nepotism and favouritism.
Counterpoint
The Lee Commission of 1924 is remembered as a step towards parity and should not be. Four British, four Indian and two promoted Indians of every ten entrants reserved forty per cent of every intake for Britons by birth, inside a system whose entire claim was selection by competition. A quota by nationality written into a merit examination is the clearest evidence that the examination was never the obstacle - the terms on which it was held were.
Problematisation
The scale has changed beyond comparison and the document does not dwell on what that costs. The first regular recruitment under the Constitution, in 1950-51, recommended 60 people. Applications crossed one lakh in 1976. About 5.50 lakh candidates sat the 2026 Preliminary, each face-authenticated in six to eight seconds, and a scan of fifteen years of records rejected 569 applicants who had lied to claim extra attempts. An institution built to find a few hundred officers now administers a national sorting exercise, and the backgrounder publishes no success rate for it.
Conclusion
A century of this institution is a century of two separate achievements: making selection honest, which it did early, and making access real, which took until 1940 and arguably longer. The unfinished part is in its own subtitle - inclusion - and it is the one claim the document supports with no numbers at all.
Deploys into: Constitutional bodies and their independence · Indianisation of the civil services · Merit, access and the Lee Commission critique · Scale and integrity in mass examinations
PIB Backgrounder (Union Public Service Commission) · 2026-09-30 · PRID 2316840 · PIB source ↗
Related: Union Public Service Commission · Lee Commission · Articles 315-323 · Prakash Singh vs Union of India