New Delhi: In 2014, when the Modi government just came to power in New Delhi, bureaucratic circles were abuzz with how IAS and IPS officers from Gujarat were appointed to key positions across the central government and investigative agencies.
The trend continued as late as until three years ago, when secretaries in the ministries of defence, education, and commerce, were all from Gujarat. At other levels, like additional secretary and joint secretary, too, officers from Gujarat occupied important positions in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and the ministries of finance and home affairs as well as the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC).
Cut to 2024, and Gujarat officers are few and far between in the central government.
At present, there is only one secretary from the cadre in the government — Srinivas Katikithala, who is serving as secretary, minority affairs.
At the level of additional secretary, there are only two officers from Gujarat — D. Thara, a 1995-batch officer, in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and T. Natarajan, a 1996-batch officer, in the Department of Defence Production in the defence ministry. At the level of joint secretary, there are four officers from Gujarat serving at the Centre, including one in the defence ministry.
In the PMO, too, the Gujarat connection seems to be increasingly getting weaker. While P.K. Mishra, a 1972-batch Gujarat-cadre officer, continues to be at the helm in his capacity as the principal secretary to the PM, there is no Gujarat-cadre officer among the advisers, additional secretaries and joint secretaries.
The only exceptions are private secretary to the PM, Hardik Shah, and S.R. Bhavsar, an officer on special duty (OSD) in the PMO. Both Shah and Bhavsar were officers of the Gujarat state service, and were promoted to the IAS after the Modi government came to power at the Centre.
“It goes against the public perception, but actually the officers serving in the central government are now from different cadres,” said a senior IAS officer serving at the Centre. “The trend of Gujarat officers holding key positions is not true anymore at all,” the officer added.
The trend is only logical, the officer said. Ten years, they added, is a long time — both to be in Delhi and away from Gujarat — for the Gujarat connection to lessen.
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Similar trend in other services
The story is similar in investigation agencies, where Gujarat-cadre IPS officers like Rakesh Asthana (CBI) were serving in top positions until a few years ago.
With Asthana at the helm, the CBI was said to have officers from Gujarat working in other senior positions, too.
However, the CBI is now headed by Praveen Sood of the Karnataka cadre.
While the NIA, another premier investigation agency, has no Gujarat-cadre officer at the senior level, the CBI has one additional director general and one joint-director-level officer from the state.
Government sources say the CBI had recently requested the central government for officers from Gujarat, where the agency is tackling several cases of bank fraud, but has few senior officers from the state to oversee the investigations.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), which was headed by two officers of the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) who had earlier led the income tax department in Gujarat — Sushil Chandra and P.C. Mody — is now headed by Nitin Gupta.
The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is headed by Tapan Kumar Deka, an IPS officer of the Himachal Pradesh cadre. The agency — with one joint director and two deputy directors from the Gujarat cadre — has no officers from the cadre at senior levels either.
A diverse bureaucracy
Among secretary-level officers in the central government, there is no longer any one cadre that dominates.
At seven each, Bihar and Odisha account for the highest number of secretary-level officers. They are followed by Tamil Nadu (six officers serving as secretaries), and Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand (five each).
Among the senior officers from these cadres are cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba, and Amit Khare, adviser in the PMO, from Jharkhand, and finance secretary T.V. Somanathan from Tamil Nadu.
The PMO, too, is a mixed bag. The two advisers, Khare and Tarun Kapoor, who are both retired officers, are from the Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh cadres, respectively.
The four additional secretaries are all from different cadres — Punya Salila Srivastava from AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory), Arvind Shrivastava from Karnataka, Hari Ranjan Rao from Madhya Pradesh, and Atish Chandra from Bihar.
Of the three joint secretaries to the PM, Deepak Mittal is from the Indian Foreign Service, while C. Shridhar and Rohit Yadav are from the Bihar and Chhattisgarh cadres, respectively.
An officer who recently retired from the government as a secretary said the trend of Gujarat officers dominating in important positions was bound to recede as the government spent more time in New Delhi.
“You see, there was too much made out of the Gujarat officers in Delhi to begin with… Every government brings its trusted officers when it comes to power,” he said. “As it builds trust in other officers from across the country, this government is no longer bringing people from Gujarat… That was always going to happen.”
An earlier version of the report erroneously referred to former NIA chief Y.C. Modi as a Gujarat-cadre officer. He is an officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre. The error is regretted.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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