Case studies
Case studies — administrative dilemmas
12 min read · Updated 2026-05-25
What is an administrative ethical dilemma?
An administrative ethical dilemma is a situation where an officer must choose between options that each carry moral weight, under time pressure and incomplete information, with no unambiguously right answer. GS-IV's Section B answers it in four steps — identify, analyse, evaluate, decide — testing each option against four lenses: legality, morality, public interest and integrity.
The story
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.