M. Sudha Devi, 31/ IAS

M. Sudha Devi, 31/ IAS, Additional Commissioner, Mandi, Himachal Pradesh
Married at an early age, Sudha (looking up) had to give up her studies. When the marriage broke up after four years, she finished her BA from Coimbatore, and prepared for the civil services, which she cleared at the first attempt, after joining a coaching institute in Delhi. The daughter of a farmer, she grew up in the tehsil town of Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu.

"My humble background makes me better able to understand and relate to people’s problems. When I see a farmer with grievances standing in front of me, I see my father."

Greater access to the system helps. Until the late '60s, the civil services exam was the preserve of the English-educated. It could not be taken in another language. Thereafter, candidates were permitted to take some papers, and then all except one basic qualifying English paper, in an Eighth Schedule language. Weightage for the personality interview, in which candidates from elite backgrounds are perceived to have an advantage, was reduced. (It is now just 13 per cent of the total marks). Changes like these helped Malegaon boy Mohammad Qaiser and Varanasi lad Govind Jaiswal make it to the top this year.

Twenty-nine-year-old Qaiser, who took the exam in Urdu, was disappointed by his poor interview result. It did not stop him, however, from standing 32nd in a gruelling three-part exam taken by one-and-half-lakh people at the first stage. Govind, whose muscular and idiomatic Hindi is palpably better than his English, topped the list of Hindi-medium candidates this year. One in four now prefers to take the exam in Hindi, or a regional language. Their success rate is far lower than that of English candidates, but still, their numbers are rising.

And then, of course, there is reservations. The 27 cent per cent reservation of seats for OBCs since the mid-'90s, in addition to the 22.5 per cent reserved for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, has begun to radically transform the composition of an upper caste-dominated higher bureaucracy. There may be unfilled quotas in the lower services, but in coveted services like the IAS, IPS and IFS, they are intensely sought. OBCs, especially, are boosting their representation in these top services by making it to the general category. According to the Department of Personnel, in the last five years, 32.5 per cent of officers inducted into the IAS have been OBCs.

The impact can be seen in the individual stories of young men and women who are among the first to represent their communities in the bureaucracy. For example, Sudha Devi, a young additional commissioner in the Himachal cadre, is the first woman from her Kangavellalar farming community in Tamil Nadu to make it to the IAS. Says Sudha, "My getting in has been an eye-opener for this area and my community—so many others are preparing now. Every time I go home,girls come to me for counselling."