Would you pass the world’s toughest exam?
Thirty million Indians want a job on the railways, but a fiendish general-knowledge test stands in their way
By Harriet Shawcross and Dipanjan Sinha
In the summer of 2019, a 23-year-old student called Neeraj Kumar boarded a sleeper train from Delhi to the city of Patna in eastern India.
A berth was beyond his means so he planned to sleep on the floor during the 16-hour journey.
Discomfort didn’t bother him – he was on his way to the middle classes.
Kumar had grown up in a village a few hundred kilometres east of Patna.
His family were poor, lower-caste farmers.
The village school was so basic that children sat on fertiliser sacks instead of chairs.
Kumar was a bright boy, and felt driven to make something better of his life.
At first he dreamed of becoming a footballer, but then decided he wanted to be an engineer, like his older cousin.
In 2015 he won a place at a government-run engineering college in Rajasthan.
Suddenly his life was transformed.
Instead of mucking around in the dirt with the village boys he played games of badminton after class, and walked through the park at dusk with fellow students, discussing the latest films.
He liked political cinema, stories which dramatised the injustices he felt as a lower-caste kid.
The heroes of these films always seemed to defy the odds.
After graduating Kumar moved to Delhi to take the ferociously competitive civil-service exam, which he needed to pass in order to become a government engineer.
It was a long shot, but he was determined.
For a while his father sent him money to cover food and rent so that he could spend all his time preparing for the tests.
After several months of this his sister got engaged and the payments stopped.
Weddings are an expensive business in India, and the family could not afford to support both siblings’ futures.
Kumar considered his options.
He'd heard that the Ministry of Railways had many more jobs available than the civil service.
Perhaps he should sit those entrance exams instead.
Being an assistant train-driver wasn’t his dream. But it was a proper job, and seemed achievable.
Train in vain? Neha Bharti, 26, has spent the past three years preparing to resit the ticket-inspector exams (opening image). Neeraj Kumar has been studying in Musallahpur for six years (top) living in a small room he shares with two other young men (above)He applied in 2018, but bungled the process by failing to get the paperwork from his undergraduate degree in order.
A friend suggested he wait for the next round of exams in Musallahpur Haat, a suburb of Patna where dozens of coaching centres were concentrated, and the rent was cheap.
Kumar, an incorrigible optimist, felt his heart lift.
He persuaded his father to scrape together an allowance that would allow him to live in Musallahpur, which was much less expensive than Delhi.
It was monsoon season when his train pulled into Patna Junction; rain poured through the metal grille that ventilated his grimy compartment.
He stepped out, relieved to escape the smell of fried food and sweat, and walked up the platform past the fancier, air-conditioned coaches.
These cars, which Indians call AC, have sealed glass windows and blinds.
Kumar had never set foot in one.
My children will do better, he thought.
Once I am working on the railways, they will always travel AC.
He had to take a rickshaw to Musallahpur – taxis refused to go there because its potholed streets were choked with students.
The driver honked furiously at the waves of young people surging across their path.
On the sides of the road, mountains of revision books and practice papers were on sale.
It was a strange sort of student town – there were no bars, or posters plugging concerts and talks.
The only events advertised in Musallahpur were practice tests.
On other billboards the faces of exam coaches stared down, stern but benevolent.
Behind the main drag was a labyrinth of backstreets, teeming with classrooms and libraries.
About half a million students are currently preparing for government exams in Musallahpur.
The intensity of cramming is the same as you might find among those preparing for the civil-service exams in Delhi, but the Musallahpur students are mostly from poor backgrounds, aiming for low-level positions.
Many are taking the railway-entrance papers; some are studying for jobs in other public-sector institutions such as the police or the state banks (students often sit for multiple professions at the same time).
For most government departments the initial tests are similar, and have little direct bearing on the job in question.
Would-be ticket inspectors and train-drivers must answer multiple-choice questions on current affairs, logic, maths and science.
They might be asked who invented JavaScript, or which element is most abundant in the Earth’s crust, or the smallest whole number for a if a456 is divisible by 11.
Students have no idea when their preparations might be put to use; exams are not held on a fixed schedule.
Stage coach Khan Sir, Musallahpur’s most popular exam coach, gives a lecture to a packed hall (top). He now runs a multimedia education empire, including a coaching centre in Patna (above)Kumar made his way to the bare, windowless room his friend had arranged for him to rent and started working.
Every few days, he’d check the Ministry of Railways website to see if a date had been set for the exams.
The days turned into weeks, then months.
When the covid pandemic erupted he adjusted his expectations – obviously there would be delays.
The syllabus felt infinite and he kept studying, shuttling between libraries, revision tutorials and mock test sessions.
Before he knew it he’d been in Musallahpur nearly six years.
As his 30s approached, Kumar began to worry about running out of time.
There is an upper age limit for the railway exams – for the ones Kumar was doing it was set at 30.
As a lower-caste applicant he was allowed to extend this deadline by three years.
His parents urged him to start thinking about alternative careers, but he convinced them to be patient.
His father, who was struggling to keep up the allowance, reluctantly sold some of the family’s land to help support him, and Kumar studied harder and longer.
Late last year, he found out from a friend that the exam had been announced.
He checked the Ministry of Railways website and sure enough, there was the date: November 27th 2024.
In a few weeks, the moment he’d spent his adult life preparing for would be here.
Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold.
The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless.
Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds.
At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).
Station to station Students spend most of their time in cheap air-conditioned working spaces which they call libraries (top). Kumar studies late into the night at home (above)This is partly an indictment of the education system, which has been criticised for its outdated curriculum and tendency to prioritise rote learning over critical thinking.
But it also reflects the fact that the private sector is simply not creating enough jobs for the growing number of graduates, while public-sector jobs continue to be cut.
For all the buzz around India’s unleashed entrepreneurial spirit, government jobs remain stubbornly popular.
They promise a position for life, regardless of competence – a sharp contrast with the precariousness of the private sector.
They come with pensions and other benefits. Some offer the chance to augment income through corruption.
Indian society accords public-sector jobs a special respect.
Grooms who have them are able to ask for higher dowries from their brides’ families.
“If you are at a wedding and say you have a government job, people will look at you differently,” said Abhishek Singh, an exam tutor in Musallahpur.
Railway jobs in particular still have a vestigial glow of prestige.
The concourse in front of Patna Junction is dominated by a decommissioned steam engine with bright yellow railings.
Christened the “Saint of Sabarmati”, it remains on display as testament to the country’s complicated romance with trains.
Patna was a stop on one of the first main lines to be built by the British in 1862, running between the coal mines of Bengal and the then capital, Calcutta.
Trains were initially viewed with suspicion.
Local people could not understand how they flew through the country at such speed.
Rumours circulated that they were somehow powered by kidnap victims who had been snatched at night and buried beneath the sleepers.
Railways were mostly run by British companies, and their primary purpose was to facilitate trade with the colonial metropole.
But they also opened up new possibilities for commerce and cultural exchange within India, boosting the prosperity of districts connected to the network.
After independence in 1947 the railways were nationalised, and the Ministry of Railways became an important government department.
It offered employees a remarkable range of perks.
As well as a pension they could expect bonuses, lodgings or reduced rent, a medical allowance, free travel and the chance to play cricket.
(Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the former India captain, started his career as a ticket inspector playing for a regional railways team.)
To the point Track-maintenance workers (top) are among those who have to take the general-knowledge test. Students contemplate buying Khan Sir’s revision books (above)Neha Bharti, a 26-year-old studying for the railway exams, remembers the privileges given to her grandfather, a stationmaster in Amritsar.
When she was younger, she had only to mention his name when she boarded a train and she’d be allowed to travel without a ticket.
One of her earliest memories is of walking into the two-bedroom bungalow by the station that her grandfather was given: it seemed like a palace.
“He even had servants who cleaned the place and served food,” she said.
“Whenever I went to his office, everyone treated me with respect.”
In her grandfather’s day, a job on the railways was likely to have been secured through patronage.
In the 1980s the ministry standardised its recruitment processes, and gradually introduced nationwide exams.
Today it employs 1.2m people.
Many are in low-level positions: tracklayers, catering assistants, ticket collectors and clerks who keep the 70,000km of track running.
Salaries for these jobs are modest, if still significantly higher than the national average.
An inspector’s monthly wage is around 60,000 rupees, or $700.
The pensions are not what they used to be.
But that doesn't seem to be putting people off.
During the most recent recruitment drive there were around 90,000 positions on offer and roughly 30m people went for them.
For some jobs, such as junior ticket collectors, applicants face odds of more than 1,800 to one.
The Ministry of Railways says its entrance exams are produced by a committee of experts “on the basis of educational qualification, eligibility criteria and nature of work profile”, but in practice they function as a rather arbitrary filtering mechanism for a volume of applications that would otherwise be overwhelming.
The concentration of so much hope in such a narrow funnel creates a peculiar atmosphere in Musallahpur.
Lives are both in a holding pattern, and hurried.
Students who have asked their families to make sacrifices on their behalf feel guilty for squandering time on anything other than cramming.
Socialising is minimal – after classes people pause for a minute or two to chat to each other at tea stands, then press on to the libraries.
These are little more than rooms with an internet connection and a desk where, for a few hundred rupees, you can sit under the air conditioning for six hours.
They are open 24 hours a day, with discounted rates at night.
Many stay to watch online tutorials well into the small hours, their faces flickering in the blue light of their phones.
Tunnel vision Students travel from across India to visit Khan Sir’s coaching centre (top and above)Even eating is done as briskly and functionally as possible.
Students buy puris at stalls and stuff them in their mouths in between library sessions, washing the food down with sugar-cane juice pulped at the side of the road.
During power surges, when sparks fly down from the transformer boxes above the road, no one stops to look.
There are almost no children around.
Though many live in Musallahpur for years, it isn’t somewhere to build a life.
One morning last year about 3,000 students gathered in a classroom the size of a small aircraft hangar to hear Musallahpur’s most popular exam coach speak.
He goes by the name of Khan Sir (retro pseudonyms are popular in India: one of his rivals is called Physics Wallah).
Young women filled the rows in front of him, three or four to a desk; thousands of young men sat behind.
Those who couldn’t get a seat lined the aisles and leant against the wall.
The lecture was live-streamed on Khan Sir’s app, and broadcast to two other rooms in the Khan Global Studies learning centre.
For the benefit of those sitting at the back it was also showing on four huge TV screens hanging from the ceiling.
“I have fought my father.
I have fought my brothers to come here.
And I am not asking for a single rupee.
I will earn it all myself.
Just give me the chance”
Khan Sir, a shortish man in his early 30s with a neatly trimmed beard and round cheeks, was preparing students for the current-affairs segment of their exam.
He had projected a map of the world on the whiteboard behind him, and now gestured with a laser-pointer at the Middle East.
“When spring comes we all feel like it is now time to put away the blankets and shawls,” he began, speaking in Hindi.
“So when something that big happened in the Arab countries, it was called the Arab spring.
It led to utter chaos.
It started from Tunisia.
Where did the Arab spring start from?”
“Tunisia,” responded the class in unison.
On the billboards of Musallahpur, Khan Sir’s face appears more frequently than that of any other tutor.
His YouTube channel has 25m subscribers, and students travel from across the country to see him in person.
When Kumar saw a Khan Sir video on his phone for the first time, he was inspired.
He couldn’t believe that someone who spoke with the same village-boy inflections as him could be so confident and worldly.
High pressure Bharti and her roommate keep Khan Sir’s videos playing as they prepare a meal (top). Moments of peace are scarce (above)This is the key to Khan Sir’s popularity.
The tests, which are printed in English and Hindi, are written in the formal diction of an old-fashioned Oxbridge entrance exam.
But many of the people taking them are one generation out of illiteracy, and get their news from YouTube.
Khan Sir bridges the gap, explaining things like Newtonian motion and Trump’s trade policy with homely metaphors and dad jokes (when teaching a science segment he describes the decibel scale as ranging from the threshold of human hearing to “your wife!”).
Although he is one of India’s most recognisable celebrities, Khan Sir is extremely guarded about sharing personal information.
His real name has been reported in the Indian press, but he refuses to confirm it.
Given the political and religious tensions in the country, he’d rather no one knew where he came from and what he believes.
Like many of the tutors in Musallahpur, Khan Sir got into the coaching business after his own unsuccessful attempt to get a government job – several years ago he passed the entrance exam for the army but failed the physical test.
Dispirited, he found work as a welder in Patna.
When he noticed all the hopeful students coming to take government entrance exams he thought he might try his hand at teaching.
Gradually he acquired a following.
During the pandemic he moved online and created a YouTube channel.
As well as the app his empire now spans branded textbooks and six coaching centres across India.
“The railways are going on the track of corporate culture.
There are more trains, the workload is increasing, but the manpower keeps going down”
He doesn’t teach a particular subject – government exam questions range across multiple disciplines.
Depending on what job a candidate is applying for, they might also have to take a more specialist technical paper or physical test afterwards.
Many roles also require an interview.
The difficulty of the questions varies.
Some seem a reasonable test of educational competence; others are almost comically obscure.
In this they follow a long tradition in public-service exams set by the British.
Plum administrative posts in the Raj were reserved for white men, and obtained through patronage and connections.
In the middle of the 19th century the government introduced competitive exams, which were, theoretically, open to all British subjects, including Indians.
The exams made it harder for well-connected incompetents to get a job, but also excluded many Indians because the questions often seemed to require a British classical education (and the ability to travel to London, where exams were held until the 1920s).
Candidates might be made to translate Cicero, or discourse on 15th-century Scottish poetry.
The railway-service exams today require candidates to answer multiple-choice questions rather than write an essay.
But they can still be brutally hard.
Someone wanting to become an assistant train-driver could be asked:
The current affairs questions are so random that they sometimes seem designed for no other purpose than keeping people in a permanent purgatory of revision.
It’s hard to know where your preparation should end when you might be asked questions such as, “Who propounded the homeopathic principle ‘like cures like’?” or “As per November 2020, how many countries have membership in the World Trade Organisation?”
Coaching centres such as Khan Sir’s sell a range of services to make this knowledge acquisition less intimidating.
Reasonably priced – an online three-month course costs around 750 rupees, or $9 – their offerings include small-group “doubt sessions” where students can confess to not understanding the questions; six-hour online classes in the run-up to exams, known as marathons; and mock tests.
Even with assiduous preparation, many students fail to make the cut-off mark, which is set differently each time.
Often they wait in Musallahpur for the next round of exams to be called, which can take years.
In 2022 the railways authorities held exams for a class of jobs known as Non-Technical Popular Categories, which includes ticket inspectors.
After the papers were collected the authorities announced that candidates were going to have to take another exam.
The students were furious (“It’s like training for the Olympics, running your race, and then they move the finishing line,” said Khan Sir).
Riots broke out across the state; protesters occupied railway tracks and set fire to a train.
This desperation fuels an unsavoury business on the fringes of the exam-preparation industry: cheating.
Papers have been known to leak in advance of the exams.
According to Khan Sir some of these illicit tests sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
Track and field Students train for their physical tests (top and above)The consequences can be catastrophic.
If an irregularity is identified the exams may be called off, forcing people to wait an indefinite amount of time for the chance to take them again.
Last December one of the papers in the Bihar Public Service Commission entrance test was reportedly leaked, and some exams were cancelled.
Shortly afterwards a Musallahpur student, who had been planning to sit one of the cancelled tests, was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his room.
He was one of Khan Sir’s star pupils.
Khan Sir attended the funeral.
In videos of the event, the demi-god of Patna looks strangely lost and vulnerable as he helps the boy’s family lay cloths on his body.
“This was a very helpless moment for me,” Khan Sir recalled.
Since the student’s death Khan Sir has waged a personal campaign against paper leaks and cheating.
He lodged a case with the High Court requesting the publication of CCTV footage from all exam rooms, so that cheats checking their answers against leaked documents would be exposed.
Khan Sir’s office is stacked high with parcels of blank postcards, which he plans to ask his pupils to send to the High Court in support of the petition.
“If I do not fight for them, then God will never forgive me,” he said.
Other tutors try to convince their pupils to come up with an alternative to a railway job.
Abhishek Singh works at a coaching centre called Platform, which specialises in helping people pass the railway exams.
He worries about students who spend their 20s revising instead of developing experience and contacts in the world of work.
Even the most diligent preparation is no guarantee of passing.
“You have to get a backup for your future because it is a game,” he warned.
“And a game can be won, but it can also be lost.”
The students' hopes are tenacious, however.
Bharti, the stationmaster’s granddaughter, sees it as her salvation.
Before she moved to Musallahpur she had felt trapped.
She was working as a nurse, much to the chagrin of her family, who wanted her to get married.
At the small private hospital where she was employed the doctors were always making suggestive comments and trying to catch her alone.
She didn’t know where to turn for help.
Then she saw one of Khan Sir’s videos on YouTube and was hooked: with his help, she was sure she could crack the exams and get a government job.
She moved to Patna in 2022 and applied to become a ticket inspector.
On the straight and narrow Students sit a mock test (top) and cram while lining up for another mock test (above)She didn’t pass the exam, but told herself she would study even harder for the next round.
She was still waiting to take it when 1843 visited Patna three years later.
Her father had recently given her an ultimatum: land a railways job within the next six months or come home and get married.
Every time she visits her village she senses the hemmed-in life waiting for her, and feels the horizon contract.
“When I go home I like to watch Khan Sir videos, to remind me what it feels like in Patna,” she said.
“I have fought my father.
I have fought my brothers to come here.
And I am not asking for a single rupee.
I will earn it all myself.
Just give me the chance.”
People who make it through the gruelling entrance process may find a job on the railways disappointing.
Ticket inspectors spend hours fighting their way through the narrow aisles of the sleeper carriages, the workhorses of India’s railway system.
Bunkbeds are stacked three tiers high on either side.
Many of the people wedged into the seats between them have come from the sardine tin of compartment-class, a notch below sleeper, and are hoping to get away without paying for the more expensive ticket.
Vendors move down the aisles with fried chickpeas, tea and instant coffee.
Noisy fans stir the warm air without reducing the temperature much.
When the inspectors arrive in their crisp black-and-white uniforms, people start negotiating with them about discounts for unused berths, or how big a fine they have to pay for sitting in the wrong carriage.
Rakesh, 30, is an inspector on the long-distance route (the name is a pseudonym, as he's afraid of getting in trouble with his bosses).
He spends eight hours going up and down carriages, then waits at the station for a train to take him home.
He has to hang around for up to 12 hours, but this doesn’t count as overtime.
Rakesh studied for more than two years to get a job on the railways.
Now he regrets it.
He hates spending so much time away from his wife – sometimes he's not even allowed to take the days of religious festivals off.
All he can think about is escaping the job, but he can’t afford to leave.
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