Meet IITian, who left high-paying job to appear for UPSC exam, became IAS officer with AIR...

UPSC is one of the toughest exams to crack to become an Indian IAS officer. To pass the civil service exam, a person studies religiously for several hours. Each year, thousands of candidates seek to take the exam to become IAS, IFS, IPS, and IRS. Only a few number of them succeed in the most competitive exam. Today we will talk about Kanishak Kataria, an IIT graduate who left a high-paying job to crack UPSC. 

IAS Kanishak Kataria’s journey from an IIT alumni to becoming an IAS officer is an inspiration for many UPSC aspirants. He quit his lucrative job to prepare for the UPSC exam, where he achieved an AIR 1 in 2019. He is now posted as an SDO in Ramganj Mandi, Kota.

Kanishak hails from Rajasthan. He graduated from Kota's St. Paul's Senior Sec. School. From the beginning, Kataria was a bright and academically motivated student. He secured the 44th rank in the IIT JEE 2010 and got into the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where he studied for a B.Tech Honours in Computer Science and Minors in Applied Statistics.

He began his career at Samsung Company in South Korea as a data scientist. He moved to Bengaluru to work for an American startup company after working there for a while. Although it was a well-paying job, he decided to quit.

He made the decision to study for the UPSC rather than switching to a different company to get paid more. After spending seven or eight months in a coaching centre in Delhi, he went back home for self-study. Later, with his hard work, he secured All India Rank 1 in 2019.

In a previous interview, Kataria claimed to be an expert in artificial intelligence as well as a sports enthusiast.