Berhampur: Five candidates of Odisha, guided by the newly launched Ganjam Lakshya Niketan (GLN), have qualified in the UPSC Civil Services Exam-2025, making the Ganjam district administration proud. The results were declared on Friday.The district administration had launched GLN in Jan to coach civil services aspirants online for the UPSC exam, 2026, free of cost. It conducted mock interview for candidates, who qualified for the mains online by forming a panel.“Of the nine aspirants from Odisha who had applied for the mock interview in GLN after seeing it on social media, five qualified in the UPSC Exam-2025,” said Ganjam collector V Keerthi Vasan. The qualified students — Sattwik Satyakam Devta (100 rank), Sai Raman Patra (rank-285), Vishal Pattanayak (rank-341), Debabrata Pramanik (rank-467) and Gopinath Sahoo (rank-795) — expressed gratitude to the district administration after publication of the results.“The administration set up a six-member panel (all IAS and IPS officers) to conduct the mock interview and to guide the aspirants how to face the interview and share their experience of interviews,” said collector. The panel members were Niti Sekhar, inspector-general, southern range, Ganjam collector, SP (Berhampur) Saravana Vivek M, Berhampur Municipal Corporation (BeMC) commissioner Prathamesh Arvind Rajeshirke, sub-collector (Berhampur) Avinash Kumar and an IAS probationer, Mrinalika Rathore.“The mock interview was conducted online for two days, where they took about one to two hours for each candidate,” said the sub-collector, Berhampur. “During the interview, we shared our own experiences and guided how to appear the interview, he said.“We are very happy as five of them qualified in the examination,” he said before adding, “We hope more candidates qualify in the UPSC exam next year, when they start coaching classes from March last week.”The administration has already conducted an entrance exam on Jan 25 to enrol in the coaching centre based on their merit list with a total intake capacity of 170 and 50% of them for women. “Three centres will be set up at Berhampur (70 candidates) and Bhanjanagar and Chhatrapur (50 candidates at each centre). The administration has already signed an MoU with a Delhi-based coaching institute to impart coaching to the aspirants,” said Kumar.
