Polity, economy, international relations, environment - everything for civil services prep
Stay updated with daily current affairs curated specifically for UPSC Civil Services preparation. This feed covers polity, economy, international relations, environment, science & technology, and all topics essential for IAS, IPS, and other civil services examinations.
Over 1.2 million candidates register for the UPSC Civil Services Examination each year, competing for roughly 1,000 positions. The Preliminary exam alone eliminates over 97% of aspirants, and current affairs — which cannot be studied from a fixed syllabus — often determines who makes it through. Yet the way most aspirants consume current affairs is fundamentally broken.
The typical UPSC aspirant relies on one or two newspapers (usually The Hindu or Indian Express), a monthly magazine like Yojana or Kurukshetra, and a coaching institute's compiled notes. This approach has three serious problems. First, no single newspaper covers all UPSC-relevant topics with equal depth. The Hindu excels at international relations and environmental policy but gives less space to defence and science. Indian Express is strong on governance and the judiciary but thinner on economic data. Second, coaching notes are compiled weeks after events occur, stripping away the context and evolving nature of policy debates that UPSC questions increasingly test.
There is a subtler issue that most aspirants overlook: editorial framing shapes how you understand an issue, and UPSC expects multi-dimensional analysis. If you only read one newspaper's take on the farm laws, the new criminal codes, or India's stance at COP summits, you absorb that outlet's framing as fact. UPSC's Essay and GS-II papers specifically reward candidates who can present multiple perspectives — something impossible if your source material only offers one.
The Balanced News addresses this by aggregating current affairs coverage from 50+ sources — national broadsheets, regional dailies, government publications, and international outlets covering India. For a topic like the Semiconductor Mission or the new UGC regulations, you can see how The Hindu frames it as a policy analysis, how Economic Times covers the business angle, and how regional media reports the ground-level impact. This multi-source approach mirrors exactly what UPSC expects: the ability to examine an issue from political, economic, social, and ethical dimensions.
Every story includes source diversity so you can practice the multi-perspective thinking that separates toppers from the rest.