After a long wait, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) 2026 prelims results were released last week. Neha (name changed), 23, a humanities student, did not clear it. She is upset, she says, but was not banking on clearing the civil services examination in her first attempt.UPSC is one of India’s most prestigious competitive examinations for recruiting senior government administrators, and has long been tied to prestige, social mobility and job security. The success rate is below 1% — which is why entire neighbourhoods, such as Old Rajinder Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar in Delhi, came up around its preparation.Today, increasingly, aspirants like Neha are preparing for the UPSC (which has three stages: preliminary, main and interview) by themselves. The reasons are many, from circumventing expensive coaching fees to creating hyper-personalised study material. Neha didn’t want to leave her Nagpur home to enrol in a coaching centre, so she paid over ₹1 lakh to enrol in a year-long online classroom by a well-known Delhi-based institute. It didn’t add any incremental value though, and she often found it difficult to schedule a weekly one-on-one session with her mentor. So, she left the course midway and turned to self-study and a new coach: books, downloadable material, short-form explainer videos, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).