The Preliminary Examination: syllabus and analysis

Examination Pattern

Paper	Nature	Questions	Marks	Duration
General Studies Paper I	Objective	100	200	2 hours
General Studies Paper II (CSAT)	Objective, qualifying	80	200	2 hours

One third of the marks assigned to a question is deducted for a wrong answer. Decision making questions in Paper II carry no negative marking. Paper II requires a minimum of 33 percent, that is 66 marks, and contributes nothing beyond qualifying. Selection for the Main Examination is decided by Paper I alone. Marks scored in the Preliminary Examination do not enter the final merit list.

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The Syllabus

The text below is the official wording of the Union Public Service Commission notification, reproduced in full.

General Studies Paper I

Official wording · reproduced unchanged

• Current events of national and international importance.
• History of India and Indian National Movement.
• Indian and World Geography: Physical, Social, Economic Geography of India and the World.
• Indian Polity and Governance: Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.
• Economic and Social Development: Sustainable Development, Poverty, Inclusion, Demographics, Social Sector Initiatives, etc.
• General issues on Environmental Ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change, that do not require subject specialisation.
• General Science.

General Studies Paper II

Official wording · reproduced unchanged

• Comprehension.
• Interpersonal skills including communication skills.
• Logical reasoning and analytical ability.
• Decision making and problem solving.
• General mental ability.
• Basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude, etc.) at Class X level. Data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency, etc.) at Class X level.

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Analysis

Seven lines and six lines. The brevity is not vagueness. The Commission is describing a mind, not prescribing a course. What follows is why each line is there, what the question has become, and what to read.

Current events of national and international importance

The officer inherits a running country. She takes charge in the middle of ongoing policy, litigation, negotiation, and crisis. The operative phrase is national and international importance: the filter is significance, not novelty.

The Commission has largely stopped asking direct current affairs questions. It now uses a current event as a doorway into static knowledge. A summit becomes a question on the grouping's mandate. A mission becomes a question on orbital mechanics. Read the news to find out which parts of the static syllabus have gone live, not to collect events.

History of India and Indian National Movement

Almost every administrative problem in India has a history that explains its shape: land records, reservation, state boundaries, the structure of the police, the tribal question in central India. An officer who does not know where an institution came from will misread why it resists change. The national movement carries the added weight of being the source of the constitutional settlement.

Ancient and medieval questions have thinned and now skew towards art, architecture, and religious movements rather than dynasties. Modern history is steady and rewards precision about sequence and the ideological differences within the movement. Culture is unpredictable and rewards familiarity rather than mastery.

Indian and World Geography

Geography is where policy meets physical constraint. Water availability, monsoon behaviour, soil, minerals, coastline, and terrain decide what is possible in a district before any scheme is designed. An officer who cannot read a map cannot read her jurisdiction.

Physical geography is conceptual and increasingly overlaps with environment. Map based questions on rivers, tribes, protected areas, and international locations appear every year, almost always tied to something in the news.

Indian Polity and Governance

This is the officer's operating manual. Every power she exercises is delegated, bounded, and reviewable. She must know the source of her authority, its limits, who can overrule her, and what a citizen can do about her decision.

The Commission has moved from provision recall towards conceptual and comparative questions: what a term means, how two institutions differ, what follows from a constitutional principle. Polity remains the highest yield component in the paper because it is finite, stable, and heavily represented.

Economic and Social Development

An officer spends her career moving public money and answering for what it produced. Notice that the syllabus pairs economic with social development. The Commission is not asking for macroeconomic theory. It is asking whether you understand growth as something that must reach people.

Questions fall into three kinds: concepts such as inflation, monetary instruments, banking, and taxation; schemes, with their eligibility and funding pattern; and data drawn from the Economic Survey and major indices. Candidates find this component slippery because the terminology is precise and the intuitions are not obvious.

Environmental Ecology, Biodiversity and Climate Change

This moved from the margin of the syllabus to its centre for a straightforward reason. India is now making decisions where ecological cost and developmental gain conflict directly, at scale, in almost every district. Clearances, forest rights, water disputes, and climate commitments are administrative work.

The qualifier that do not require subject specialisation is a promise the Commission does not entirely keep. Species questions tied to conservation status and habitat have become notably harder. Convention questions test membership, obligations, and reporting bodies. Read the qualifier as a statement about breadth, not difficulty.

General Science

Technology is now a governance subject rather than a technical one. Data protection, spectrum, vaccines, genetically modified crops, semiconductors, nuclear energy, artificial intelligence in public services. An officer who cannot follow the science cannot evaluate the advice she is given.

The word general is doing real work. The Commission is not testing a physicist. It tests whether an educated non specialist holds the concept correctly. Two streams appear: fundamental science from school textbooks, which is stable and finite, and applied technology from the news, which is the growing half. The second produces the harder questions, and they are conceptual rather than factual. The Commission asks what a technology can and cannot do, not who built it.

Paper II: The Aptitude Test

Routinely dismissed because it is qualifying, and that dismissal has ended a great many attempts.

The paper tests a floor, not a ceiling. A civil servant reads audit paragraphs, budget annexures, and statistical reports. She must extract a conclusion from a dense passage without misreading it and follow a chain of reasoning under time pressure. Note that two of the six heads, interpersonal skills and decision making, are not aptitude at all. They are ethics in a multiple choice format, which is why those questions carry no negative marking. The Commission wants an unpressured answer.

The paper has hardened, particularly the comprehension passages, which are now dense and often philosophical or economic. The typical failure is not inability but neglect followed by panic: eleven months of avoidance, a first mock in the final fortnight, and an attempt lost on a paper worth no marks.

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What to Read

Polity

• Indian Polity by M. Laxmikanth, more than once
• The Hindu
• NCERT Class XI Indian Constitution at Work first, if your foundation is uncertain
• The bare text of the Constitution for Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles, and the Emergency provisions
• PRS Legislative Research for bills in progress

Geography

• NCERT Geography textbooks classes 6 to 12
• A value added source with as many diagrams as possible
• Oxford Student Atlas for India, used actively, with every place name located rather than read past
• G. C. Leong for climate and landform processes, where the NCERT is thin

Art and Culture

• Indian Art and Culture by Nitin Singhania, as a reference to consult rather than a book to read through

Ecology and Environment

• Ecology and Environment: A First Principles Companion for the Civil Services Examination by Abhishek Kumar (forthcoming)
• The free resources on this site
• NCERT Class XII Biology, the four ecology chapters, for the concepts the compilations assume you already hold
• Down To Earth, which is written at almost exactly the level the Commission examines
• Official material at summary level: the India State of Forest Report, MoEFCC releases, IUCN and Wildlife Institute of India updates, and the headline findings of IPCC and UNEP reports

Science and Technology

• Science and Technology: A First Principles Companion for the Civil Services Examination by Abhishek Kumar (forthcoming)
• The Hindu
• NCERT Science Class VI to X once, properly
• NCERT Class XI and XII Biology for physiology, genetics, and biotechnology, which yield disproportionately
• PIB releases from ISRO, DRDO, DST, and the Department of Biotechnology

Ancient and Early Medieval India

• A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century by Upinder Singh
• NCERT Class XI Themes in Indian History, or the old NCERT volumes by R. S. Sharma and Satish Chandra if you can find them
• Tamil Nadu State Board Class XI for ancient India

Modern India

• India's Struggle for Independence by Bipin Chandra
• From Plassey to Partition and After by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

Current Affairs

• The Hindu, editorial and explained pages only
• Press Information Bureau releases for scheme names, dates, and official figures
• Yojana and Kurukshetra for developmental depth
• One monthly compilation, chosen once and stuck to
• Sansad TV and PRS Legislative Research for legislation in motion

Economic and Social Development

• NCERT Class XI Indian Economic Development as the foundation
• One standard reference, either Ramesh Singh or Sanjiv Verma, not both
• The Economic Survey and the Union Budget for chapter summaries and headline numbers
• RBI and NITI Aayog publications for institutional detail

Paper II: Aptitude

• Previous year papers, which are the best material available by a wide margin
• Any one standard aptitude manual for arithmetic and reasoning practice; the volume of practice matters far more than the choice of book
• For comprehension, summarise one dense editorial a day in two sentences

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Reading the Two Papers Together

Paper I decides your rank in the screening. Paper II decides whether that rank counts. Neither mark survives into the final merit list.

That last fact is the one candidates internalise last. Everything built for the Preliminary Examination serves a paper that is then discarded. So the only preparation worth doing is preparation that also serves the Main Examination. Build understanding deep enough to answer a descriptive question, and the objective question becomes a retrieval from it. Build recognition tuned to the objective paper alone, and you will clear the screening with nothing to write in September.