BHUBANESWAR: For IAS aspirants who wish to take geography as their subject but cannot afford coaching fees, Odisha cadre bureaucrat Somesh Upadhyay has a solution. The 2017-batch IAS officer, currently serving as collector of Deogarh district, has authored a geography book for aspiring civil servants, especially those who find it difficult to take coaching due to financial constraints.
The bureaucrat, often admired for his out-of-box ideas, took four years to complete the book which is a first-of-its-kind attempt to provide a one-stop solution with brevity and simplicity that ease the civil services preparation journey of aspirants. Titled ‘Indian Geography through Maps’, the comprehensive book was released last month.
“Though books that are handy for civil service aspirants on other subjects are available, the same is not the case with geography. The existing ones are bulky and maps are dull and not clear. After I cleared the exam, I thought of writing a map-based book with short and crisp descriptions to ensure the subject is covered easily in a short duration and answers are improvised,” said the young administrator.
He started working on the book after he joined as sub-divisional magistrate at Titlagarh in Balangir district in 2019. Collection and compilation of data was the biggest roadblock he faced during the pandemic and had to authenticate all the data available from different sources. “The book has my own notes and hand-drawn maps. As a student, one can be strong enough in geography if s/he can draw maps easily. I have written on how one can draw maps in 10 seconds,” he said.
Son of a migrant labourer, coaching was a distant dream for Somesh and without it, understanding the subject was difficult. He then prepared his own notes from books collected from libraries in Delhi and study material available online. His dedication paid and Somesh scored the highest in the subject in 2017 when he cracked the UPSC exam with 34th rank.
The plan to write a book on the subject hit him during his UPSC preparation days. Although from a science background, he chose geography as an optional subject for the prestigious exam. Prior to writing the book, he had launched a portal (ias34.com) and was mentoring the aspirants for free. Somesh has also uploaded his own notes and that of some best rank holders for reference in the portal which gets over 300 hits per day.
A native of Awari in Bihar, the officer has been on an extraordinary journey. He had to move to suburban Howrah in West Bengal where his father Upendra Kumar Upadhyay worked as a daily wager. He studied in Ramharipur Ramakrishna Mission, Bankura in Bengali medium though it was not his first language. He became one of the toppers in 10th board in West Bengal.
After completing his master’s from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, he dropped his plans to pursue a career in science and started preparing for the UPSC exam in Delhi as his father always wanted to see him as a civil servant. In 2015 when Upendra died of oral cancer, a distraught Somesh missed the prelims by two marks. But he did not give up. “I was unable to stay in Delhi for poor finances and had to shift to Banaras to stay with a cousin and prepare for the exam,” he recalled. His book, meanwhile, has been receiving tremendous response from all quarters.
WHAT MAKES THE BOOK UNIQUE?
More than 100 maps and diagrams
Solved previous years papers of prelims (2014-2023)
Unsolved previous years papers of geography optional and GS 1 (2014-2022)
Updated data and figures