As my son stared at his half-eaten plate, the walls of his room told a story of quiet penance. Maps pinned like silent witnesses. Timetables etched with military precision. And on his laptop, a lecture playing on loop — a life kept on hold — while he prepared for one of the most demanding public service exams in the country.
In that moment, we didn’t see a candidate. We saw the angst and anguish that has quietly become the inheritance of an entire generation — the coaching lanes of Sadashiv Peth in Pune, the cramped paying-guest rooms of Mukherjee Nagar in Delhi, the silent homes where parents tiptoe around their own houses, afraid that the clatter of a vessel might shatter their child’s concentration.
In China, the Gaokao is so intense that flights are rerouted over testing areas and honking is banned near exam centres. In South Korea, the Suneung brings the entire nation to a standstill — stock markets open late, military exercises cease, and students running late are given a police escort. The pressure of these exams is a shared human experience. But in India, something else breaks the aspirant — not the syllabus, but the system. Delayed exams, shifting schedules, court stays that freeze recruitment mid-way, papers that leak, and age-limits that quietly expire while the administration dithers.
When we began looking seriously at Maharashtra’s recruitment machinery, the problem was not just that it was slow and opaque — it was that it was recruiting for a government that no longer existed. Over 1,100 Recruitment Rules, collected from 33 departments, many written in the 1960s, were still quietly determining who got hired and on what terms. A modern state that wants to deliver cannot afford to get its hiring wrong — it needs people with the right skills, familiar with digital tools, trained in disciplines that exist today, not qualifications designed for a different era of governance.
So we did what no one had apparently thought worth doing for a very long time — we actually sat down and read the rules. All of them. It was, to put it plainly, tedious. Page after page of eligibility conditions and service classifications, some typed on yellowed paper, some in language so archaic it took a moment to understand what post was even being described. There were moments when we worried the departments would simply refuse to play along — 300 consultations are a lot to ask of a bureaucracy already stretched thin. But they didn’t revolt. Somewhere beneath the weariness of those long meetings, each department seemed to understand that this was not paperwork for its own sake. That it meant something — to the government’s own effectiveness, and to that young person sitting in a rented room, notes spread across a narrow desk, dreaming of a life in public service.
The result was the Bucket System. The idea was straightforward enough — group cadres doing similar work, requiring similar qualifications, into common exam buckets. Fourteen hundred processes coming down to 47. Rajya Seva expanded from 35 to 61 cadres. Eighteen new combined services created — Legal, Medical, Engineering — because there is no good reason a government should run fifteen separate exams to hire fifteen lawyers.
And then there were the dying cadres. Over 230 posts identified as having outlived their purpose — the stenographer being the most visible symbol of a government still staffing itself for 1975. They will be phased out, with full protection for those already serving. Nobody is being pushed out. But we are done pretending that a government trying to deliver services in 2026 needs to keep recruiting as though it is still 1965.
Other changes followed. Interviews for non-gazetted posts have been scrapped entirely — subjectivity has no place in a system that owes candidates transparency.
And then there is Nipun Setu. Think of the young person who missed the cut by half a mark — two, three, four years of their best life spent in a rented room, rationing hope alongside groceries, only to slide back to the very beginning — like a snake and ladders game. Except it is not a game. Nipun Setu ensures such candidates remain visible to public and private employers alike, because a near-miss deserves a chance.
The real moment of reckoning came not in any office or committee room. That same son who once sat staring at a cold plate has cleared his exams. The maps are still on the wall — but now they mark the district he will serve, not the distance he has yet to climb. The timetables are gone. In their place, a posting order.
Maharashtra’s youth are not asking for miracles. They are asking for a fair, transparent, and timely system — one that respects the years they invest and honours the sincerity of their ambition. But this reform is not only about them. A state that recruits well, recruits right, and recruits on time is a state that can actually deliver — to its farmers, its students, its sick and its poor. The foundation has been laid. MPSC must now take this forward — common syllabi, published calendars, results without delay — so that Maharashtra gets the capable, qualified workforce that its citizens deserve.
The author is additional chief secretary (services), general administration department, Government of Maharashtra.
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