UPSC is hiring IMD scientists with a general-aptitude paper. Eight syllabus items, zero science.
This Sunday, UPSC holds the recruitment exam for 46 permanent scientist posts at the India Meteorological Department. I have a PhD qualifications in meteorology. I can't sit it, and if I could, it wouldn't test anything I know.
Earlier this year I applied for this Scientist-B post at the IMD. 46 permanent posts - 30 in general meteorology, 7 in atmospheric sciences, 9 in instrumentation. The actual job of telling the country when the rain is coming.
The syllabus has 8 items. Current affairs. Logical reasoning. Mathematics and numerical ability. Basics of energy and environment. Basics of project management. Basics of material science. ICT tools and e-governance. Human values and professional ethics. I read it three times looking for the meteorology. There isn't any. No atmospheric physics, no fluid dynamics, no thermodynamics, no climate. There is nothing on that paper that could tell me apart from someone who has never seen a weather balloon go up.
Then I scrolled down to see what else was on the notice, and understood why. It's a combined exam. The same two-hour paper, same hall, same afternoon, also shortlists Assistant Directors for the MSME ministry — chemicals, food, hosiery, leather and footwear, metal finishing. One syllabus for the people who will forecast the monsoon and the people who will inspect shoe factories. I don't think anyone sat down and decided that. It's just cheaper to run one paper than five.
The paper is 75% of the score. The interview is the only place anyone might ask about my research — 25%, and you only get there if you clear the paper first. All fifteen centres are in India. So on the 11th afternoon there will be a hall in Delhi with my application in it, and me five thousand kilometres away.
But my application is the least interesting thing here, so let me say the part that actually keeps me up.
The monsoon is changing. The next twenty years of Indian earth science are going to be about attribution, about forecasting extremes that look like nothing in the historical record, about building models for this subcontinent instead of borrowing ones built for the mid-latitudes. That is hard, specialised work, and it decides how to implement adaptation and mitigation policies in the 2040s.
The people trained at the frontier of exactly that work are, right now, scattered across the world in Europe and the US. Not because they chose to leave permanently. Most of us went for the training, and we are, to a person, waiting for a way back. It's the job we have been pointing ourselves at for a decade. And the only door available to us is a general-aptitude paper we can't even physically sit, scored at 75% against an interview nobody reaches without it.
Some of the best meteorology work anywhere comes out of IITM Pune and IISc, and the candidates sitting Sunday's paper are doing the rational thing with the only door that's open to them.
But look at what the post actually asks for. The essential qualification for Scientist-B is a Master's degree. That's it. You can be appointed a Scientist at the IMD without having done a single piece of original research, not as a loophole, but as the advertised bar.
I don't begrudge anyone that. But then what was the PhD for? Those of us who spent eight or ten years actually doing the work, running the models, publishing papers, training on precisely the problems IMD exists to solve get no credit for it, no relaxation, no extra weight in the shortlisting. We aren't over-qualified. We're invisible to the form.
I would get on a plane tomorrow to sit an exam that actually tested the subject. I just can't work out who decided this was the right instrument for the job, or who I would even ask.
Has anyone here sat one of these combined papers? Did it feel like it was selecting for the job it was attached to?