Key facts
- The Centre has debunked social media claims of a leaked UPSC Civil Services preliminary exam question paper.
- The Press Information Bureau's Fact Check wing stated these allegations are untrue.
- An institute clarified that its early publish dates for answer keys were for organizational purposes, not evidence of a leak.
- The NSUI had demanded an impartial investigation into the alleged leak, citing a high number of questions from a single coaching institute.
- UPSC examination question papers are developed by experts selected from across India.
The Indian government has officially dismissed social media reports alleging a leak of the question paper for the recent UPSC Civil Services Preliminary Examination. The Press Information Bureau's (PIB) Fact Check unit on Tuesday labeled these claims as "fake" through a post on X.
These allegations gained traction following social media posts, including one from the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress party, which demanded an impartial investigation. The NSUI suggested that if a significant number of questions in the General Studies Paper-I originated from a single coaching institute, it warranted serious scrutiny.
The PIB Fact Check emphasized that UPSC examination papers are developed by subject matter experts from across India and urged the public to rely only on official information. It also shared a clarification from an institute, Anantam IAS, which addressed claims that its pre-exam publish dates for answer key explanations indicated a leak.
Anantam IAS explained that the earlier publish dates were a routine content management practice to logically sequence and distribute its detailed explanations of the General Studies Paper-I, preventing a flood of notifications to subscribers on a single day. The institute stated that these dates were not evidence of a leak and that their faculty had prepared the explanations after the paper was publicly available.
The civil services examination is a multi-stage process conducted annually by the UPSC to select candidates for prestigious government services, including the IAS, IFS, and IPS.