UPSC Assistant Director, IEDS (Food) official syllabus guide

UPSC Assistant Director, IEDS (Food) syllabus 2026

The written test is not a food technology paper. UPSC sets one combined recruitment test for all the 2026 IEDS Assistant Director disciplines and the IMD Scientist-B posts, so every candidate answers the same general, aptitude and engineering-fundamentals syllabus. Your food technology degree is tested in the interview, and the written test only decides who gets called to it. Final merit weights the test and interview 75:25.

Exam pattern and marking

• Offline pen-and-paper test on 11 October 2026, 2:00 to 4:00 PM (two hours)
• Objective multiple-choice questions, all carrying equal marks
• Medium: English and Hindi (the 2025 test was English only)
• One-third of a question's marks deducted for each wrong answer; no penalty for a blank
• UPSC does not state the number of questions or the total marks
• Recruitment test and interview weighted 75:25; the interview qualifying standard is 50 for General/EWS, with relaxed standards for other categories

Assistant Director Grade-I and Grade-II (Food), IEDS: combined recruitment test syllabus

Current affairs and development

• Current national and international issues in social, economic and industrial development

Aptitude and numerical ability

• Logical reasoning and analytical ability
• Mathematics and numerical ability

Engineering and management fundamentals

• Basics of energy and environment
• Basics of project management
• Basics of material science (the 2025 notice said material science and engineering)

Information and communication technology

• ICT-based tools and their applications, including networking, e-governance and technology-based education

Values and ethics

• Human values and professional ethics (the 2025 notice called this ethics and values in the engineering profession)

Source: UPSC 2026 combined recruitment-test notice ↗. Source: UPSC 2025 combined recruitment-test notice ↗. Source: UPSC recruitment-test notices ↗. Checked 2026-09-26. The examining authority's current document remains definitive and should be verified before planning examination preparation.

Section weight by year

Section marks are calculated from each available UPSC Assistant Director, IEDS (Food) paper. The table records how marks were distributed in each year represented on this site.

Counted from the question banks on this server. Where our reproduction of a paper is short of the official total — figure-dependent questions we cannot carry — the exam page says so against that paper.

Changes in examination pattern

These changes are derived from comparisons of consecutive papers for the same post and do not represent an official announcement.

See every UPSC Assistant Director, IEDS (Food) exam resource on the site — full papers, sectional tests, cut-offs and eligibility.