He Passed the Exam Before He Played for India: Amay Khurasiya and the Two Tracks That Both Worked

In 1999, Amay Khurasiya walked out to bat for India at Pune in the Pepsi Cup tri-nations tournament and scored 57 off 45 balls against Sri Lanka on his ODI debut. He was twenty-six years old. He had been playing first-class cricket for Madhya Pradesh for a decade. He had already cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination.

He was, on the day of his India debut, already a government employee.

This is not a story about a cricketer who became a bureaucrat after sport failed him. The UPSC was not a fallback. It was a parallel track that he built while playing, cleared while still active and then set aside, choosing to continue playing cricket rather than take up a posting immediately. The safety net was in place before it was needed. He went to the crease at Pune already holding it.

The Cricketer Before the Exam

Amay Khurasiya was born on 18 May 1972. He made his first-class debut for Madhya Pradesh in 1989-90, at seventeen. Over the next seventeen consecutive seasons, he played 119 first-class matches, scored 7,304 runs at an average above 40, with 21 centuries and 31 half-centuries. He was one of the most consistent run-scorers in Madhya Pradesh’s cricketing history.

MP domestic cricket in the 1990s was competitive, unsponsored and long. The schedule was full: back-to-back Ranji matches, city-to-city travel by train, shared accommodation and no national contracts for players below the international threshold. The domestic cricketer’s life has always required the kind of self-management that no one coaches you on.

Somewhere inside that schedule, across those seventeen seasons, he prepared for and cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination.

What the UPSC Requires

The UPSC Civil Services Examination is considered India’s most demanding competitive exam. It runs in three stages: the Preliminary, the Mains and the Interview. The Mains requires written answers across nine papers including General Studies, an Optional subject and an Essay. The entire process, from notification to final result, takes roughly a year. The success rate is below one percent.

Clearing it requires sustained preparation across history, geography, polity, economics and current affairs, alongside a chosen Optional subject studied at depth. It cannot be cracked by rote. It rewards breadth of understanding and the ability to think and write clearly under pressure.

Amay Khurasiya built this preparation alongside a full-time first-class cricket career. Both demands were genuine. Both were met.

The Choice He Made

When he cleared the UPSC, a government posting was available. Cricket was also available. The two tracks, which had run in parallel for years, had both arrived at an outcome simultaneously.

He chose to keep playing cricket.

He was still young enough. He was still performing. The India call-up came in 1999. He was included in the squad for the 1999 Cricket World Cup in England. He played 12 ODIs in total.

The UPSC result did not expire. The Inspector’s posting in the Indian Customs and Central Excise Department was there when he eventually stepped back from active cricket. He is serving in that role today.

The sequence matters: he cleared the exam, continued playing, represented India, completed his domestic career over seventeen seasons and then the posting was waiting. The safety net did not shrink the athletic career. It ran alongside it and then caught him when he was ready.

What Domestic Cricket Built

The connection between what the UPSC requires and what a long domestic cricket career builds is not incidental.

Seventeen consecutive first-class seasons requires showing up when selection is not guaranteed. It requires performing against players who want the same three or four places you want. It requires absorbing a lean patch and returning to the nets without anyone asking you to. It requires travelling, sleeping badly, playing on difficult surfaces and finding your form without a support structure around you.

These are not soft skills. They are the precise conditions under which UPSC preparation also happens: self-directed, without guaranteed outcomes, requiring sustained effort across a long timeline with no immediate feedback and a single high-stakes assessment at the end.

The athlete who has operated in that environment for a decade is not starting from scratch when they sit down to prepare for a competitive exam. They know what sustained daily effort looks like. They know how to perform on a day that matters after months of preparation that nobody witnessed. They know what it costs to be underprepared and what it feels like to perform well under pressure after earning the right to confidence.

Amay Khurasiya did not crack the UPSC in spite of being a cricketer. He cracked it because of what being a cricketer at that level, for that long, had built in him.

After the Playing Career

His post-playing career has not been administrative. He has stayed in cricket.

He coached domestic players across age groups. Among the names that came through environments he worked in are Rajat Patidar and Avesh Khan, both of whom went on to represent India. Their trajectories are their own, but the coaching they received during developmental years shaped them.

In 2024, he was appointed head coach of the Kerala cricket team. Kerala had participated in the Ranji Trophy for over six decades without reaching the final.

In the 2024-25 Ranji Trophy season, under his coaching, Kerala reached the final for the first time in the state’s history. They qualified dramatically, by a two-run first-innings lead over Gujarat in the semi-final. They played Vidarbha in the final and lost. The result did not diminish what the journey represented: sixty-eight years of participation and a first final, in one season under a new coach.

He wrote a book on Kerala’s Ranji Trophy emergence. Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble contributed inputs to it. That two of the most respected figures in Indian cricket contributed to his book is itself a record of where he stands in the ecosystem.

What This Is For

There is a version of the student-athlete’s story that treats sport and serious academic preparation as alternatives. Either you focus on sport and accept that the exam track will suffer, or you prioritise the exam and accept that the sport will be managed down. The framing is binary, and it is wrong.

Amay Khurasiya did not manage his cricket down to clear the UPSC. He played 119 first-class matches and scored 7,304 runs. He was a central figure in Madhya Pradesh’s batting lineup for seventeen years. He represented India. He was in a World Cup squad.

He also cleared the UPSC before any of the international career happened.

Both tracks were built simultaneously, not by sacrificing one for the other but by running them in parallel as separate demands that the same discipline served.

This is the version of the story that Indian student-athlete families need access to. Not “you have to choose.” The specific documented case of a man who chose both, built both and had both available when he needed them.