Over 63 per cent of the total candidates recommended by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) for the Civil Services Examination (Mains) during 2017-21 had Engineering degrees, Rajya Sabha was informed.

Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh presented data of candidates recommended for CSE (Mains) showed that out of 4,371 aspirants who appeared during the period, 2,783 were from the engineering stream, reported PTI.

The statistics further showed that 1,033 candidates came with Humanities backgrounds, 315 from Science and 240 Medical graduates.

On the other hand, Humanities background contenders ruled the charts with 597 postgraduates in Humanities and 243 postgraduates in Engineering clearing the examination.

The data presented by the minister on Thursday in response to a question showed that 3,265 male candidates (74.6 per cent) and 1,106 woman candidates (around 25.4 per cent) made it through the examination during 2017-21, added PTI.

The candidates recommended by the UPSC had preferred to write their papers in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, English, Dogri and Maithili.

Political Science and International Relations, Sociology, Anthropology and Geography remained preferred subjects optional during the Mains examination, it showed.