Use of AI for the first time in UPSC exam, brakes on dreams of many candidates

You all must remember the name of Pooja Khedkar. You might remember how a trainee IAS officer was accused of circumventing UPSC rules by allegedly making changes in his identity and documents. This case had made a lot of headlines across the country and many questions were raised on the selection process of UPSC. Now UPSC has taken steps to avoid any such situation in future. For this the Commission has taken the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In fact, the Union Public Service Commission used AI for the first time in the Civil Services Examination 2026 and took major action. Even before the exam, UPSC rejected 569 such applications, which were found ineligible as per the rules. These included many candidates who had attempted more than the prescribed limit or had crossed the age limit. At the same time, in some cases, multiple applications were made by the same person.

According to reports, this step has been taken about two years after the famous Pooja Khedkar case of 2024. Pooja Khedkar was accused of changing her name and parents’ names and giving the UPSC exam despite completing the prescribed limit of attempts. Later his candidature was canceled and he was also dismissed from service.

For the first time, investigation was conducted before prelims.

Till now UPSC used to conduct such tests at the interview stage, i.e. after the candidates had passed both the prelims and mains examinations. But this time the Commission took the help of technology and started investigation at the application stage itself.

According to UPSC, this year 8.18 lakh candidates had applied for the Civil Services Examination, while about 5.49 lakh candidates appeared in the examination. A decrease in the number of applications has also been recorded as compared to last year.

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AI searched 15 years of records

According to reports, about 94 percent candidates had opted for Aadhaar based verification. The remaining 49 thousand applications were examined with the help of AI. AI identified duplicate applications by matching the candidates’ names, parents’ names, date of birth and photographs.

After this, on the basis of the records of the last 15 years, the Commission also checked whether the candidates had crossed the maximum number of attempts or the age limit prescribed for their category.

Investigation revealed by AI

At the time of checking with AI, 43,497 such candidates were also found who had changed the category this time compared to their previous attempts. For example, some candidates had earlier applied in General category and this time applied in EWS or other reserved categories.

UPSC verified the information by sending emails to all such candidates. After scrutiny, 133 applications were rejected only because the candidates had exceeded the limit of attempts permitted as per their new category.

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