Anthropology Optional Success Rate in UPSC: Official Data and Trends

How many Anthropology candidates actually get selected? UPSC publishes the answer every year in its Annual Report to Parliament, which gives, for each optional, the number of candidates who wrote the Mains and the number finally recommended. This page sets out those figures for Anthropology, compares them with the other popular optionals, and explains what they do and do not tell you.

Anthropology Optional at a glance

• Latest official figure: 139 recommended out of 1,800 candidates in CSE 2022, a success rate of 7.7% (74th Annual Report, 2023-24).
• Three-year total, CSE 2020 to 2022: 329 recommended out of 4,170, or 7.9%, against an average of 8.1% across all optionals.
• Popularity: Anthropology overtook Geography to become the second most chosen optional by CSE 2022, behind only PSIR.
• Trend: the pool has grown by about half since CSE 2019 while the success rate has eased from about 9% to under 8%, the same pattern seen in every large optional.

Year-wise success rate

CSE year	Annual Report	Candidates appeared	Recommended	Success rate
2022	74th (2023-24)	1,800	139	7.7%
2021	73rd (2022-23)	1,159	90	7.8%
2020	72nd (2021-22)	1,211	100	8.3%
2019	71st (2020-21)	1,189	108	9.1%

Each Annual Report covers the examination whose final result was declared in that financial year, which is why the 74th report (2023-24) carries CSE 2022. As of October 2026 the 74th is the latest report on the UPSC website. Figures for CSE 2019 to 2021 are as quoted from the reports by several secondary sources; CSE 2022 matches the UPSC-derived dataset.

Figures for earlier years circulate online (for example 85 of 880 in CSE 2017 and 65 of 797 in CSE 2018), but we could not trace them to a report, and the sources disagree for 2015 and 2016, so we have left them out of the table.

How Anthropology compares with the other big optionals

Six optionals account for about two-thirds of all Mains candidates. Over CSE 2020 to 2022 their combined figures were:

Optional	Appeared (3 years)	Recommended	Success rate
Political Science and International Relations	5,812	481	8.3%
Anthropology	4,170	329	7.9%
Sociology	4,168	350	8.4%
Geography	3,661	255	7.0%
Mathematics	1,932	129	6.7%
History	1,791	87	4.9%
All optionals	32,048	2,601	8.1%

Anthropology sits within half a point of PSIR, Sociology and the all-optional average, and above Geography, Mathematics and History. The full table for every optional is in our optional subject success rate analysis.

What the numbers mean for you

• A success rate is not a score. It counts final selections, which depend on GS, Essay and the interview as much as on the optional. It says little about how the optional itself is marked.
• Large optionals converge on the average. Anthropology, PSIR and Sociology are the default choices of first-time aspirants, so their rates settle close to the overall 8%. A smaller subject with a higher rate usually reflects a specialist pool, not easier marking.
• What sets candidates apart is preparation. Recent Anthropology toppers have reported optional totals of roughly 270 to 330 out of 500 (see the strategy guide). The syllabus is fixed and the questions are predictable, so the gap between an average and a high score comes from coverage, diagrams and examples.
• Choose for fit. If you are comfortable with both biology (half of Paper I) and Indian society and tribes (Paper II), Anthropology’s data gives no reason to avoid it.

Sources

• UPSC Annual Reports
• UPSC 74th Annual Report 2023-24
• Optional subject success rate dataset, Dataful
• Optional subjects success rate, Synopsis IAS
• Most scoring optional in UPSC, Leverage Edu
• Optional Subject Success Rate in UPSC: Official Data, LotusArise