"General needs to be in the top 75, OBC can make IAS at 400," Vikas Divyakirti’s old clip goes viral

Vikas Divyakirti

A podcast interview from last year featuring Vikas Divyakirti, the founder of the prominent Drishti IAS coaching institute, has gone viral again, reigniting a fierce debate on the integrity of reservation policies in the Civil Services Examination (CSE).

The comments, made on journalist Smita Prakash's podcast over a year ago, detailed what Divyakirti termed a "legally possible" loophole allowing affluent candidates to exploit Other Backward Class (OBC) quotas. The resurfacing of these claims has led many to question whether the alleged vulnerabilities in the system have since been addressed.

In the interview, Divyakirti outlined the high stakes that drive such manipulation, noting the dramatic difference in selection ranks. "If you are in the General category, you have to be in the top 75 ranks to become an IAS officer. If you are in the OBC category, you can become an IAS officer even at around the 400th rank," he stated. This disparity, he argued over a year ago, creates a powerful incentive to use a reservation wherever a claim can be made.

The core of Divyakirti's argument focused on the "creamy layer" rules. He highlighted that while a candidate is excluded if a parent holds a senior government job, the rules for those with parents in junior posts or high incomes were, at the time of recording, fraught with gaps.

He specifically pointed to two issues from a year ago:

The exemption of agricultural income from the creamy layer calculation.

The fact that only parental income is considered for OBC status, not the candidate's own wealth.

Divyakirti described a detailed scenario where a wealthy government official could resign, gift all assets to their child to reduce their own income to zero, and thus allow the child, now independently wealthy, to still claim OBC benefits. "The point is, it is legally possible," he asserted in the podcast, adding he knew of specific cases.