Hurried celebration, confusion and apology: All about the UPSC story of UP's Shikha Gautam

SHikha Gautam, a UPSC prospect from Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr, chequered her ensue on process 6 "in a haste" and celebrated her "success" with her family. Even the media picked up her story as that of a daughter of a peon cracking the civil services exam.But the celebration was short-lived.In the said “hurry”, Shikha forgot that there can be more than one person with the same name. It was, in fact, another Shikha from Haryana’s Rohtak who had cleared the UPSC exam. The candidate from Bulandshahr has now apologised for her mistake.Forgot to check her roll number, celebrated with a ‘victory march’Shikha Gautam started celebrating as soon as she saw her name mentioned in the result PDF, but forgot to check her roll number. And she was not the only one in her family who made this mistake.Her family joined in the celebrations too, and a massive local celebration with 1,200 people took place, attended by her parents and grandparents. Sweets were distributed in this “victory march”, and the media also picked up on her “success story”. The daughter of a peon had cracked one of the toughest exams in the world."My sister, Shikha, has secured 113th rank in the IAS examinations in her second attempt... She has always been studious. Her vision was to be a teacher earlier... My mother is a housewife. I am very proud of my sister," her brother had told local media.The interesting thing in all this was that nobody realised that Shikha hadn't even cleared the UPSC Civil Services (CSE) Mains exam and thus couldn't, in fact, have been eligible to clear the whole thing.Shikha apologises for the confusionNow, Shikha Gautam has apologised for her confusion and admitted that she only saw 'Shikha' mentioned on the result PDF, not the roll number."The one who has been selected is different, Shikha. As both our names are the same, and I also only checked the name in the PDF and did not check the roll number, that was my mistake," she told the news agency, ANI.This is not the first case of mistaken identity to come to light in the UPSC Civil Services Examination 2025 final result. Earlier, Aakansha Singh from Bihar’s Ara district had also claimed to have secured rank 301 in the UPSC CSE 2025 examination. However, a day later, UPSC confirmed that the correct candidate who had cracked the exam was a gynaecologist, Aakansha Singh from Uttar Pradesh's Ghazipur.UPSC Civil Services Final 2025 result was announced by the Commission on March 6 (Friday). This time, Anuj Agnihotri has topped the government exam, achieving AIR 1, followed by Rajeshwari Suve M at AIR 2 and Akansh Dhull at AIR 3.