As someone with quite some civil servants (IAS (admin), IFS (foreign), and IPS (police)) in close circles (mostly acquaintances and alumni) I would beg to differ, not much, but would differ nonetheless.<p>It&#x27;s not that much about sharpness as much it&#x27;s about rot learning. As a matter of fact civil services is one of those important Indian institutions that has retained the idea of rot learning as a measure of one&#x27;s ability in all rounds of life. So the bureaucracy being worst is not at all a paradox. It&#x27;s a result of a failed method of recruitment coupled with other institutional and social handicaps like systematic corruption and general greed (in most cases barring rare exceptions) as the solve motive of these candidates.<p>Go to Delhi&#x27;s Mukherji Nagar area (centred around Batra Cinema) and you&#x27;ll see thousands of youth (some already past their youth) toiling the midnight oil mugging volumes with no interest in any of those subjects whatsoever and many of these midnight oil toilers would be declared &quot;crème de la crème&quot; of our country around the middle of every year and with that result would come a lifetime of power, its abuse, and other largesses in life that mere mortals of this large country can&#x27;t even dream of. Actually some of those luxuries would be unattainable to even the moneybags of India.<p>If you go to them as an interviewer from a newspaper (either before or after their success&#x2F;failure) you&#x27;ll get all the grandiose ideas they have for the mother nation and why they are going towards this path of being a civil servant &quot;sacrificing&quot; their lives. On the other hand if you are a friend or family, you&#x27;ll hear on dinner tables, during smoke breaks &quot;Aah, I should have taken IRS (revenue) and not waited for IPS&#x2F;IAS last year; there&#x27;s enough money right there&quot; and right then maybe the father intercepts, &quot;that&#x27;s what I was saying. Look at Sharma Ji, he recently bought 3 flats in &lt;insert a posh locality in India&gt;&quot;. Needless to say Sharma Ji is an IRS officer. You get the drift.<p>As a side note, I would like to add that I have seen honest ones &quot;turn&quot; just for survival. I am not giving them any brawny points for at least trying before corrupting, but I can&#x27;t blame them either seeing the precedences[1].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.siliconindia.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;general&#x2F;7-Civil-Servants-Who-Paid-Heavily-for-Being-Honest-nid-180346-cid-1.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.siliconindia.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;general&#x2F;7-Civil-Servants-Wh...</a> &quot;indian civil servants killed&quot; gets a lot more results on google.