Sunya IAS GS mains books

For covering the static portion of mains, I heavily relied on the Sunya IAS GS mains books (I could not make handwritten notes since I had less time due to physics). These books proved to be very useful and had many advantages making them an amazing source and great for mains:

• They are written in bullet point format with point sub-headers in bold making subsequent readings very easy and fast. Makes it very easy to scan the pages very fast.

• Holistic coverage and concise based on all points of the syllabus, nothing is skipped (covers all PYQ topics as well). Topics are discussed with multiple dimensions and from an analytical point of view which is required for mains. In fact it also contains adequate value addition material like committees, data, etc

• Best for all those topics which are in mains but not in prelims (Security, Disaster Management, Society, World History) - one-stop solution for these topics in most concise manner (eg: only 40 pages for world history)

• Also for those topics in prelims (eg: Polity) which are from a UPSC mains point of view (eg - inner party democracy, office of profit, Finance commission recommendations, Women in Judiciary, PESA). Similarly for Economics, Agriculture, etc.

You can add VAM (value addition material) like SC judgements, data/facts, examples, committees, examples/case studies, government schemes from newspaper, test series solutions, etc into the book

Other great sources for notes for GS Mains :

• Jayant Nahatta Notes (very good for ethics too)

• Rushikesh Reddy Notes

Just like Prelims, even for mains, PYQ's are the most important (eg - every year a question on cyber security is asked in GS3)

For Mains PYQ's - I used the SunyaIAS Mains Solved PYQ book. But the best way is to solve them yourself, atleast for the last 5 years. Solving doesn't necessarily mean writing it in 3 hours, but alternatively, you can even brainstorm yourself over each question and try to generate maximum points yourself. This exercise will help for mains alot

For Ethics, I used Decode Ethics by Mudit Jain.

One should make compilations on A4 sheets for examples, case study solutions, keywords, diagrams, civil servants, etc. I have shared some of my ethics notes below, which I made from the Decode Ethics book and also shared an example from Mehak Jain ma'ams notes