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Generally speaking prices were very different from today. The real purchase power was much weaker. For example food had the price range 1:30 compared with modern day prices. So if 1 kg of grain cost 1 Euro today, the price for the same amount in 1300 was 30 Euros.To build a small castle with one single large, central tower (palas), you had to invest the average amount of about 800.000 Euros, 600.000 Euros for the payment to 30 skilled labourers and 200.000 Euros for the material. It needed about 8000 working days to complete.Now, the costs to run a castle depend very much on how many people live there, how many of them were armed soldiers and where in Europe was the castle situated. The more northern and more remote a castle was built, the more expensive it was to transport the needed resources there. During periods of famine or extended wars, prices could rise up to 500% in a single month.The equipment for an single armed knight with a war horse cost about 130.000 Euros. A normal riding horse cost 25.000 Euros, a cow about 5000 Euros, a pig 1000 Euros.In an average castle there lived and worked about 200 people. 50 of them were skilled labourers, 5 were knights and the rest were women and children.All of them had to be fed, paid and taken care of. Clothes and shoes were extremely expensive, as were all tools made of iron. One simple coat cost about as much as 250 eggs. A simple pair of shoes cost about 120 apples.Milk, beer, porridge, eggs, fruit and vegetables were the daily staples. Soup in the morning, porridge for lunch, bread, beer and butter for dinner. But all in all at least a total of 5000 calories per day for a grown up man. Meat and fish was very expensive and rare.Normal labourers received their payments 50% in food and accommodation and 50% in money. During winter time salaries dropped down to 70% of a summer salary.The payment difference between a skilled labourer and a warrior knight was 1:10. Meaning the annual salary of a knight was 10 times as much.Services like the writing of an official document or certificate (ownership certificates, marriage certificates, contracts) were extremely expensive. The writing of the official certificate for a master stone sculptor cost the equivalent of a whole cow.The sculpturing of a small golden cross for the church or chapel cost the amount of 10 annual salaries of a labourer.Taking all this into consideration, the running of a small castle cost not less than 5 Million Euros per year.

The officers of Indian Revenue Service (IRS) , ‘Income Tax’ as well as ‘Customs and Central Excise’ are not frequently transferred as IAS or IPS. There is a well laid downTransfer Policy in IRS which is a public document and followed strictly by Government of India. Read http://www.cbec.gov.in/resources//htdocs-cbec/transfer_ord/transfer-policy08.pdf for more.IRS officers are able to stay at the same station for long period and transferred only once in a year in the AGT (Annual General Transfer) happening in April-May of each year. The government calls for the five choices of stations at every AGT and try to accommodate the officers on the stations where they have preferred.The government of India is extremely considerate in ensuring that the children of the IRS officers don’t suffer due to transfer. If your children are studying in Class IX/X or Class XI/XII, you won’t be usually transferred on that ground alone even if you have competed your tenure on that station. You can also represent for retention of your station if you spouse is employed at some place or transferred at a new places. These requests are considered sympathetically.However, in exceptional cases, you can be transferred on administrative reasons or on promotion when there is no vacancy of your rank-post at your present station.The education of children is thus not much affected by the transfers of IRS officers, because it is not frequent and bound by well laid down rules.

Greetings everyone!My name is Anubhav Panigrahy and I am from Bhubaneswar, Odisha. I completed my B.Tech in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in 2014. On the day of writing this, I was working as Administrative Officer at New India Assurance Co. Ltd. in Mumbai. The final results of RBI Grade B 2018 Examination were announced on February 20, 2019 and I was one of the shortlisted candidates in the Generalist stream. Since July 29, 2019 I have been working in the Foreign Exchange Department of RBI Central Office, Mumbai. Here I have tried to explain in detail the strategy that I followed to clear this examination. I hope it proves helpful to all those candidates who are working and want to crack this examination.Phase I:I have traditionally always been good at quantitative aptitude, logical reasoning and English. So I never had to refer to any textbooks for the same. However, I used to take a lot of mock tests before the actual examination. Before Phase I of RBI Grade B 2018 I took about 15-20 full-length mock tests. The best test series’ for this phase in my opinion are provided by Oliveboard and Practicemock. Please do not underestimate the importance of taking mock tests. Post-mock analysis is very crucial. Try to solve all the questions that you skipped. Check how long you take to solve these questions. For questions solved correctly, refer to the solutions provided to see if there is an easier way to work out those problems. After a two-hour mock test, at least 30-45 minutes should be spent in the analysis of performance in the mock test. In case one does not possess complete conceptual clarity, she may buy any textbook for quantitative aptitude or logical reasoning, and solve questions chapter-wise. Since I have never practised from any such book, I can’t give suggestions. However, some small/basic tips may be found below:Quant: The first step is to learn how to form equations based on the data given in the questions and then proceed with the calculation. So having conceptual clarity is a must. As mentioned earlier, any good book with chapter-wise problems and solutions would suffice. One can also practise questions directly from mock tests in a non-timed manner. Once you are comfortable with concepts, formulas, etc, the next step is to speed up mental arithmetic. For that, learn multiplication tables. Learn fraction to decimal conversions and vice-versa. Learn perfect squares up to 50 and cubes up to 20. Learn as many tricks as you can for faster mental arithmetic, because this phase is all about speed.Reasoning: My personal strategy was to leave the puzzles for the end and finish all other questions before that so that I secure a certain number of marks prior to delving in to the puzzles. Learn through mock tests which types of puzzles are your fortes and which ones should be left immediately on spotting them in the examination. This section is more about leaving the wrong ones than attempting the right ones. For better clarity on how to approach puzzles, refer to Meritshine’s channel on YouTube.English: Proficiency in English is very crucial to score well not just in this section, but also other sections of Phase I. Think of it this way, the faster you read and comprehend the questions, faster you are going to solve the questions. You can save valuable minutes by just quickly going through the questions. English is the toughest to prepare for because there are no shortcuts. Develop the habit of reading newspaper everyday without fail. The Hindu is still the most widely read newspaper by aspirants, but The New Indian Express is also just as good. Focus more on the editorials and columns, because they will also prove helpful while drafting an essay for Phase II. Read books, novels, magazines, just about everything you can lay your hands on. Keep a diary to note down new words that you learn every day. Read grammar from Wren & Martin.GA: 40% of Phase I is GA so needless to say this section has to be done well. Most of the people who are already preparing for banking examinations have an easier time scoring well in this section. One should not target anything less than 50 in this section. A lot of the questions in this section are based on current affairs and recent events, along with some basic questions on macroeconomic concepts. Nowadays there are a lot current affairs websites that provide daily, weekly, and monthly PDFs for current affairs. Studying these PDFs for the period of 3–4 months just before the Phase I examination would be enough to score well. I would suggest either Affairs Cloud or GK Today for this. Gradeup comes out with a Static GK PDF and one can have a quick look through that as well. Make sure to keep track of the countries that are in news because our President or Prime Minister visited that particular country, and learn their capitals, currencies, famous stadiums, etc. A good score in this section would ensure that you qualify for Phase II even by scoring average marks in the other three sections.Phase II:This phase tests the basic understanding of an aspirant, as well as one’s general awareness. So it is necessary to have a good mix of both. Standard textbooks have to be coupled with notes drawn from current affairs. Revision is highly necessary, and that too multiple times. I would advise everyone to stick to a very few selected sources, but revise them again and again. While a lot of online portals provide mock tests of this phase, I personally did not find any of them very useful for the actual examination. However, it never hurts to practise a few tests before the D-day. I went with the same mock tests as for Phase I, i.e. Oliveboard and Practicemock. For current affairs, I studied monthly PDFs of Affairs Cloud and Vision IAS for the period of around 6–8 months before the Phase II examination. The monthly PDFs of GK Today are also quite good. While not necessary, you may also start reading a business newspaper to get a better perspective of the ongoing activities in the economic space. I would suggest reading The Hindu BusinessLine, especially their op-ed pieces and columns. Business Standard is also good.ESI: Indian Economy by Ramesh Singh is the most suitable book for this section. In fact, this book will also cover some of the theoretical concepts of the Finance section as well. Almost all the chapters in this book (barring a few) are relevant for the examination. For people looking to read something simpler, the book on Indian Economy by S.K. Verma is also good. Focus should be on getting the basic concepts right. Mrunal’s Economy video series can also prove fruitful for this. I will reiterate the importance of revision here. Make sure to go through the topics at least 4-5 times before Phase II examination. The Budget, Economic Survey of India and recent government schemes need to be prepared thoroughly. But one need not go through the entire official documents. Condensed forms of the same are made available by Affairs Cloud, Vision IAS, etc and they shall prove more than enough. Vision IAS comes up with a consolidation of government schemes which is quite helpful. RBI publishes two annual reports viz. the Annual Report and Trends & Progress of Banking in India. Most of the newspapers will cover the vital statistics/observations made in these reports, so you need not go in to them in detail.FM: This portion is more static than ESI. Finance numerical questions have proven to be the toughest challenge for aspirants over the last few years, especially for people with no background in finance. Although there were no numerical questions asked in 2018, one cannot skip them. Just basic understanding of such problems can bring you easy 15-20 marks. These concepts can be done from the book Financial Management – Theory & Practice by Prasanna Chandra. Please note that this book does not have to be read in entirety. Compare the contents of the book with the syllabus and go through only the relevant chapters, both theoretical and numerical concepts. I even found Meritshine’s videos on YouTube quite helpful with regard to understanding finance numericals. Meritshine since then has come up with its own paid course for RBI Grade B examination, so it is possible you may not find these videos on YouTube anymore. For current affairs, the same sources may be followed as for ESI section. For Management section, I first went through IGNOU's reading material on the subject. Since my chosen optional for UPSC CSE was Public Administration, I already had a fair idea of management theories and concepts. Ultimately however, I almost entirely relied on Edutap notes. In fact, the entire FM module of Edutap if done well can fetch decent marks in a very limited period of time. However, just reliance on these notes will not be enough and they have to be complemented with self-made notes from other sources as mentioned above. A book commonly followed by aspirants for the Management section is Principles and Practice of Management by L.M. Prasad. However, I myself have never gone through that.English: This section is the most “selection-defining” section of Phase II examination, mostly because in my opinion it is neglected by a lot of the aspirants. A lot of focus is directed towards just ensuring that there are no typing or grammatical errors, at the cost of providing good content. The English section, in general, contains essay, précis writing, and a passage. Essay topics are usually drawn from recent issues in banking and finance. So it is essential to be abreast with all recent happenings around the globe. The fodder for your essay is going to come from newspaper editorials. Editorials and columns are so designed that they cover all aspects of a particular issue and provide clear arguments for and against such issues, along with hard facts. Hence, read editorials daily and save articles that you think might be important for the examination. Revise these articles at regular intervals, and update them as you go along. Selection of essay topic may also influence your score, so make sure you choose a topic that you have ample content to write on. In précis writing and passage reading, the key point to remember is to use one’s own words as much as possible. Be brief and be to the point. Overall, while it may seem like 90 minutes is sufficient to answer this section, I can’t emphasize enough the need for speed in typing. So make sure you cover that base too before you go to attempt the examination.Interview:The interview is the make-or-break round of this examination. It’s more a personality test than just a regular interview. All your lead/lag in Phase II examination can be washed away in just 15-20 minutes time in the presence of the interview panelists. Since I had not fared that well in Phase II, I had made sure to leave no stone unturned for the interview. I read 4-5 newspapers (only editorial section) everyday, most of them business newspapers like The Hindu BusinessLine, Mint, Business Standard, and Economic Times. I checked the RBI website regularly for updates, press releases, notifications, policy decisions, speeches, etc. and made my own notes on them. I thoroughly went through the functions of RBI and their various departments. It is very important to know about RBI as an organization, in and out. A book called “RBI Functions & Working” published by the Reserve Bank Staff College proved to be very helpful in this regard. It can be found on the RBI website. I went through that book at least thrice. Make sure to prepare answers for questions that can be drawn straight from your bio, like your family background, hometown, current work experience, etc. Remember that you can be faced with any kind of question in the interview. So in case you are not sure of an answer, just politely say you do not know, instead of venturing a guess out of the blue. Above all, remember to stay cool and composed, and answer everything with confidence. While I understand it is easier said than done, some practice before the actual interview can help in achieving this. Try speaking to yourself in front of the mirror. Ask your friends to study your body language and mannerisms while you speak. Try to attend as many mock interviews as you can, online or otherwise. I attended just one mock interview by Edutap over the phone, but that was enough to give me a direction. Ultimately, the interview is supposed to be a stress test, and the ones who manage to hold their nerves better are the ones who finally make it to the list.I have tried to cover all aspects of my preparation in this piece. Please remember that this is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. You may take suggestions from my experience, but it is always advisable to chart your own course towards the goal of getting selected to work for RBI. It may all seem intimidating initially, but with proper time management it will not be as tough as one might think. A period of around 6 months of preparation, where one is studying around 3–4 hours everyday, is more than sufficient to clear this examination. The important thing is to just get started. Be very honest with your efforts. Always remember that there could be a thousand reasons why you fail, but there should be no excuses. Thank you and all the best!