Chandigarh — The Bhagwant Mann government will provide free online coaching for the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) Civil Services Examination and the Punjab Civil Services (PCS) examinations to 1,000 selected college students, according to an official statement issued on 5 November.

The programme, spearheaded by Education Minister Harjot Bains, will cover 750 students from government colleges and 250 from private colleges. The statement said the coaching will go beyond online classes to include structured live interactive and recorded lectures, study material, a test series, answer-writing practice and evaluation, personalised mentorship, doubt resolution and interview guidance, accessible from anywhere in Punjab.

Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann said no young person's dream should be held back because a family cannot afford coaching or a student lives far from a coaching centre, and described the initiative as part of the government's Punjab Sikhiya Kranti programme extending into higher education. Bains said a student in a village or small-town college should get the same structured preparation as someone in a major coaching hub, and that financial circumstances should not decide how far a student can go. These are the government's stated aims for the scheme; the selection process and the start date for the coaching have not yet been announced in the statement, and students will need the education department's official notification for how to apply.

The wider PACE programme — government figures

The statement placed the new scheme inside the Punjab Academic Coaching for Excellence (PACE) programme, which the government runs with academic partners Physics Wallah and Avanti. According to the government statement, 58,614 students in Classes 9 to 12 are enrolled under PACE for free JEE and NEET coaching — 29,129 for JEE preparation and 22,096 for NEET, alongside foundational coaching in Classes 9 and 10. The statement also said 882 government school students qualified NEET-UG in 2026, 361 qualified JEE-Main and 64 cleared JEE Advanced, with NEET qualifiers rising from 437 in 2024 to 847 in 2025 and 882 in 2026. These enrolment and result figures are the government's own numbers as stated in its release; they are reported here as government claims, not independently audited figures.

Why it matters

Civil services coaching is one of the most expensive preparation tracks in India, and Punjab sends relatively few candidates into the UPSC services compared with its population — a gap opposition parties have also raised in past election campaigns. A free, state-run online track for 1,000 college students is a concrete governance promise that can be measured: the tests will be whether the selection is transparent, whether the coaching actually starts on schedule, and how the first cohort performs. For now, what exists is an announcement with seat numbers and a programme design, not an admissions notice.