For H.G. Darshana Kumar, the decision to quit a well-paying job at Infosys wasn’t an easy one, given the odds against clearing a civil services entrance. He’d been working for six years, including two years in Seattle. Kumar’s folks own a four-acre farmland in Haralakatte, a village in Karnataka’s Arsikere—a mostly rain-fed region where agriculture isn’t often viable. Kumar recalls a time when his father worked as a security guard in Bangalore.
Now, Kumar, 31, has cracked the UPSC examination in his fouth attempt, ranking 594. Kumar credits his success to a small peer group which studied together—he is the lone success among a dozen-odd who took the exams in Kannada.
Choosing a vernacular langauge comes with its own challenges, he points out. Since Hindi has a large user base, study material is easily available. “We do not have these resources,” he says. “So, it’s a double task. You need to first read it in English and then translate it.” Besides, guidance is not easily available. Kumar’s study group has created Telegram and YouTube channels to help aspirants with study material.
For Kumar, the drive to be in the civil services came quite late. “It was a culmination of several inspirational stories,” he says. A few years earlier, in 2011, he had volunteered with the Infosys Foundation in its initiative to construct toilets in Gulbarga. Later, he read about an IAS officer who had built one lakh toilets under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. “Being a government servant, you can do so many things. .”
In the four years of preparation and exams, Kumar also set up a dairy farm in Haralakatte, which he hopes will inspire others.
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