Fact Check: News of couple clearing IAS exam is six years old, shared with misleading claim

New Delhi (Vishvas News): A picture of a newspaper cutting is going insanely viral on the internet with claims that a couple has passed the IAS examination together. Several internet users are sharing this post and congratulating the couple on passing the coveted exam. Vishvas News investigated the claim and found that the news of a couple passing the civil services exam is from 2017 and is being shared with a misleading claim. Vishvas News found that Dr Avlokita Ashok and Dr Yogesh Kumar Sagar, the people mentioned in the viral post, passed the IAS exam in 2017.  

Claim:

Facebook user Ashish YT (archive link) shared the viral screenshot on February 17, 2023, and wrote, “congratulations on the selection of both IAS, which brightened the name of Bahujan Samaj.” #IAS #IAS #Jaibhim

Investigation:

To know the truth of the viral claim, the Vishvas News team started searching on Google with related keywords. During the search, we found that the media outlet Press Reader published a news report related to the viral post on June 1, 2017. According to the information given on the website, both Dr Yogesh Kumar and Dr Avlokita Ashok have passed the civil examination together.

Vishvas News team found another news report published by Dainik Bhaskar in June 2017. According to the report, in the final of the UPSC Exam – 2016, Dr Yogesh Sagar of Bareilly was ranked 223rd and his wife Dr Avlokita also passed the examination.

According to a report published on Amar Ujala on June 1, 2017, Dr Yogesh Sagar was a 2006 MBBS pass-out from KGMC. He first attempted to crack the civil services examination in 2015 but failed. In 2016, he again tried and got 223rd rank. His wife, Dr Avlokita Ashok got 915th rank in the same year.

We also searched their names on the UPSC website and found the names of both in the PDF document of the 2016 UPSC results.

For more information, we contacted Dr Avlokita Ashok. She told us that “this news is from the year 2017. Now both of us are engaged in our respecteve services. This news has no relation with the recently concluded IAS examination.”

Facebook user Ashish YT has about 5,671 followers on Facebook. After scrutinizing the user’s profile, we found that the user is influenced by an ideology.