The results of the preliminary examination for the civil services were announced recently. What will the future batch of civil servants look like? Considering the current employment data for the Indian Administrative Services, they will be overwhelmingly male, speak Hindi as their first language and are likely to be engineers.

Here's what the IAS looks like now.

Where the boys are

For every 20 male IAS officers, there are only three female officers. Since 1974, India's steel frame has incorporated  only 687 women compared to more than 3,000 men.



Northward ho! 

Together, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh contribute almost a quarter of India’s civil servants.  Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, has been represented by 619 officers over the last four decades. Bihar is the home state of over 400 officers.

Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have sent 250 IAS officers each.



The mother tongues of the officers show more variety, ranging from Bhojpuri to Bodo. Urdu is reportedly the first language of 30 officers. Kashmiri, Dogri and Mizo have been reported as mother tongues by between 10 and 20 people in the services. Surprisingly, there were no speakers of Rajasthani in the ranks.

However, Hindi is the most common first language, with more speakers than the next nine most-spoken languages. Tamil and Telugu have more than 250 speakers each, and stand at the second and third places in the list.



Parlez-vous Francais?

French is the most common foreign language spoken by IAS officers, with more than 35 people reporting that they know the language.  Six civil servants reported speaking Russian while 13 said they spoke German. Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese only had one speaker each.



Bridge builders

Engineers and economists dominate the civil services. Mathematics, law, business, sociology and art were the specialisation of around 50 people each. But there were people who had studied agriculture, defense studies, social work and medicine.