Himachal Pradesh Administrative Service (HPPSC)

Official exam info

Himachal Pradesh Public Service Commission's Administrative Service Combined Competitive Examination — the state's senior administrative-service exam. Prelims has General Studies Paper I (opening with a dedicated Himachal Pradesh history/geography/polity/culture/socio-economic clause) and an Aptitude Test Paper II (qualifying). Mains has 8 papers: qualifying English and Hindi papers, an Essay paper, three General Studies papers (GS-I/II/III, 200 marks each), and ONE optional subject (2 papers) chosen from a 31-subject list. What makes HPAS genuinely distinctive among every exam this project has onboarded: rather than a dedicated standalone state paper, each GS paper is organized as 3 Units x 3 Sub Units, and Sub Unit-3 of every single unit is explicitly and exclusively Himachal-Pradesh-specific — a fixed, recurring slice covering the state's hill-state history (Kangra/Kullu/Chamba, the Gorkha invasion, colonial administration, the Praja Mandal movement), geography and disaster-vulnerability profile, society/culture/tribes, statehood politics and governance institutions (the HP Public Service Guarantee Act, RTI implementation), economy (GSDP, Special Category Status, apple/horticulture economy) and social welfare, science and technology (biotechnology policy, e-governance, biodiversity), and tourism and environmental sustainability. Study material reuses UPSC's own GS Mains I-III citation corpus for every unit's national/world content, with 6 chapters authored fresh for Himachal Pradesh's own history/heritage/culture, geography/disaster profile, polity/governance/administration, economy/social welfare, science-technology/biodiversity, and tourism/environment/sustainability.