(This story originally appeared in on Jun 4, 2016)

NEW DELHI: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s joint general secretary (Sah Sarkaryawah) Krishna Gopal will conduct a mentoring session in Delhi with over 600 successful civil services candidates on July 17.Attendees are likely to include UPSC toppers Tina Dabi and Athar Aamir . Successful candidates attending the meeting are those who attended coaching and training sessions at Samkalp , a Sangh-run institute with three branches in Delhi and 14 across the country.Prakash, a coordinator at Samkalp, said the success rate of “our candidates” is “high”. Both toppers, Delhibased Dabi and Anantnag-based Aamir, came to Samkalp for training in mock interviews after they had cleared the Union Public Service Commission’s written exams, Prakash said. Aamir confirmed to ETthat he went to Samkalp for mock interviews to prepare for the final leg of the UPSC examination.“Yes, I went to Samkalp for the mock interview. Most people go there to prepare for the interview. They help you prepare very well, and hardly charge anything for it,” he said. He, however, was not sure if he would be able to attend the July 17 meeting.Dabi did not respond to messages from ET. “Interview is the last and the most crucial leg of the examination, and we have the best people offering guidance,” the coordinator said.Samkalp has facilitated successful UPSC candidates in other years as well, the coordinator said, but this year’s “high success rate” had led to a “significant upgrading” of the event. Hence, an RSS leader of the seniority of Krishna Gopal will address the meeting.Samkalp’s website lists former union ministers, retired bureaucrats and armed forces personnel as its mentors and advisers. The list includes former governors Jagmohan, NN Jha and Vijai Kapoor, retired IFS officer Arvind R Dev , former IAS officers Jagdish Chander Jaitley and R Ramakrishnan, and retired Lt General Kapil Nanda.The Samkalp coordinator ET spoke to claimed “60% successful candidates were associated” with the institute. “Of the total 1,078 candidates who made the cut this year, as many as 646 were coached at Samkalp at some stage of the examination or the other.In fact, of the top 100, as many as 76 candidates are associated with Samkalp,” this person claimed. He also claimed 5,000 serving bureaucrats had been coached by Samkalp in some form. ET could not independently verify these claims.“Now each state and cadre has civil servants who owe their success to Samkalp. In the next 10 years, we hope to have a bureaucracy that will genuinely contribute to nation-building with true Indian values and ethos. This is what we are working towards,” an RSS leader said. He and other RSS leaders who spoke to ET did not want to be identified.