Hailing from Birati, on the northern fringes of Calcutta, Mayuri Mukherjee was the only woman from the state of West Bengal to get into civil service in the year 2020. There was a total of seven people in the state who were selected in the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) Civil Services Examination in 2020. The only woman in the group, Mayuri, managed to score an All India Rank 159 .
With that rank, she could have easily got through to the Indian Police Service (IPS), but Mayuri chose the Revenue Services instead. A reason for not choosing the Police Service is due to the tough training one has to go through during the initial phase.
INTEREST IN ACADEMICS
Mayuri’s father was a school teacher. She also wanted to pursue the same profession and get into academics. After completing her BSc, she joined the Delhi University to pursue MSc in Botany. During that time, she was living very close to the UPSC circuit. However, that time she never thought of going for it.
She then joined the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) for her PhD and started working on getting into academics. However, while working as a researcher in Bioinformatics at the IICB, she found that the best option for her was to go abroad for postdoctoral research. She said in an interview, ““The tenure of my research fellowship (CSIR-NET) was just five years. After that I would have had to either go for postdoc or take the college service commission exams. So, I started looking for career options outside teaching or academics.”
CHOOSING UPSC
As she started exploring various other options, she started looking towards civil services, too. Her parents and the research supervisor at the IICB also encouraged her to go for it. She gave her first attempt in 2018 and also appeared for the state civil services exam but failed to get through even the first stage.
The lab work she was doing along side was the main reason she could not clear the exam in the first shot. However, in 2019, she became more focused and committed towards the exam and even joined a weekend coaching batch at the Satyendranath Tagore Civil Service Study Centre in Salt Lake. Unlike other aspirants, she planned on staying in Calcutta rather than going to Delhi and preparing.
In 2020, when Covid entered India, lockdown was imposed, and this turned out to be a boon for Mayuri. The lab was completely shut for two months, and this gave her ample of time to prepare for UPSC. She wrote her thesis along with preparing for the Prelims in October 2020, and then took a month’s leave before the Mains in January 2021.
After clearing the Mains, she moved onto the interview stage and finally got selected with 159 rank.
