HYDERABAD: Behind every successful student, is is a teacher who motivates and encourages them. The recent announcement of the UPSC results had many Telugu students bagging ranks. Bala Lata is that teacher, who has helped many aspirants to not only crack the competitive UPSC exams, but also get top ranks. Though she has faced numerous challenges all her life to prove herself, she not only stood by her students, but also proved that she is a strong woman with great intellect.
When she was just 11 months old, Bala Lata was diagnosed with polio which was caused by a reaction to the vaccine. “With both my lower limbs non-functional, I studied at home itself. I completed my class X, Intermediate and graduation through distance learning. Later, I studied law from Osmania University and sat for Civils,” she says.
In her first attempt in 2004, she ranked 399. It was when her posting got delayed, that other other aspirants started coming to her for advice. “They started to study with me,” she says. Bala Lata got a posting in Chennai as an assistant director in Defence and later as deputy director in Delhi. In 2012, she was posted back to Hyderabad, after which she started teaching students here as a hobby.
She sat for the Civils again in 2016 and bagged an all-India rank of 167. “I wanted to sit for the exam for a second time because the teacher should also know how to crack it. One of my students, who gave the exam at the same time, scored all-India 3rd rank. For the last seven to eight years our academy has been doing well,” says Bala Lata, whose passion is to bring out more civil servants.
Despite being able to crack the Civils twice, Bala Lata chose to teach because she believes that if she can give this nation 500 civil servants in her lifetime, it would be a far better service. Speaking of the challenges she faced in her career, she says, “When I was preparing for Civils, mobility was a challenge. We do not get access to washrooms at the exam centres. A bigger challenge was time management,” she says.
Sharing her strategy to ace the exams, she says: “The syllabus is like an ocean, but if you know how to swim, you can get selected easily. We have a concept called negative marking and you should know which questions not to answer. Similarly, in the preliminary, there is a C-SAT exam. Students usually do not practise enough and struggle with time management. When it comes to the interview, expression is most important. I train my students in all these aspects over a period of one-and-half years.”
Her students are her life
For Bala Lata, what she’s doing now is not just teaching, but much more. “My life is all about my students. I want to give this nation a minimum of 1,000 civil service officers over the next 10-12 years,” she says