India is squandering its brightest minds chasing a dream with a 99.9% failure rate, economist Sanjeev Sanyal warned, sharply criticizing the UPSC civil services obsession as a “complete waste of human resource.”

In a searing critique during a podcast with Kushal Lodha, Sanyal—member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and bestselling author—tore into the culture surrounding India’s civil services exam, calling it both “irrational” and “destructive.”

“Now tell me how many things are there with a 99.9% failure rate that you would recommend somebody to do unless it has a very large payoff?” he asked, questioning the logic behind devoting years to an exam with such staggering odds.

Sanyal acknowledged that civil services have value, but slammed the trend of young people becoming “professional UPSC aspirants.” He pointed out that many spend their most productive years preparing—often repeatedly—only to return empty-handed while peers rise through corporate ranks.

“They’ll come back and the people who were with them, their classmates, meanwhile have worked for five years, moved up the value chain… they will probably be their boss’s boss,” he said.

The economist didn’t hold back on the coaching industry either, branding it a “coaching class mafia” that profits off young aspirations by peddling a near-failure product. “Imagine the product they’re selling. It’s a product that is going to fail you 99.9% of the time,” he said.

Even among the successful 0.1%, Sanyal argued, the payoff isn’t guaranteed. “The bulk of them will do mostly mundane things… even the successful guys are going to be mostly doing mundane things.”

Instead, he urged India’s youth to channel their talents into areas with better odds and greater impact—entrepreneurship, sports, writing, or art. “If you must aspire to something with low probability and high payoff, then why not do it for something which is going to give you a real serious payoff?”