Case studies

Story hook

It is 11:30 pm on a Friday. Maya Iyer, IAS, two months into her first sub-divisional posting in a Tamil Nadu coastal town, gets a call from her superintendent of police. A truck full of imported diesel has been intercepted — papers are forged, but the trucker is the local MLA's brother-in-law. The MLA, an ally of the ruling party, is on the phone with the District Collector. The Collector, who has known Maya for two months, has just asked her to "see if something can be worked out — the boy is from a good family." Maya has 90 minutes to decide: file the FIR, log the seizure, or quietly release the truck with a fine and a warning.

She has three options. Each will hurt someone. None is risk-free. She has no precedent to cite, no rulebook section that exactly covers this. What she has is an Indian Penal Code, a Customs Act, an oath of office, the CCS Conduct Rules, a sleeping town, and her own conscience.

This is the raw substance of an ethical dilemma in administration — not a textbook puzzle, but a 90-minute window in which abstract values collide with concrete consequences. This unit teaches the method of navigating them: a four-step framework — Identify → Analyse → Evaluate → Decide — that turns the panic of a midnight call into a defensible decision.

Why this matters for UPSC

GS-IV Section B is entirely case-study based (six cases x 20 marks = 120 of 250). Three of those six are typically administrative ethical dilemmas. UPSC has tested these in every year since 2013. The examiner is looking for a structured answer — not a moral sermon, but a 4-step analytical journey. Interview boards probe the same dilemmas through "what would you do?" questions.