New Delhi: For decades since Independence, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) has been the most prestigious and coveted of the country’s nearly two dozen civil services. Be it the positions of district magistrates and chief secretaries in the states, or joint secretaries and secretaries at the Centre—the IAS has had a near-hegemony over the most important administrative positions.
However, after 10 years in power, the Narendra Modi government has decisively broken that dominance. According to data obtained by ThePrint under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, of the 236 officers serving as joint secretaries (JS), once considered the most important policymaking positions at the Centre, only 80 are IAS officers. In other words, just over 33 percent of joint secretaries currently serving in the central government belong to the IAS.
This, civil servants say, is a major departure from the older convention when IAS officers completely dominated joint secretary ranks.
The numbers are changing, albeit slowly, even at the level of additional secretaries—hierarchically, the second highest rank at the Centre. While officers anecdotally say that until 10 years ago, it would have been rare to find even two or three non-IAS officers posted as additional secretaries, currently, 33 percent of the additional secretaries at the Centre—37 of 112—belong to services other than the IAS.
However, as the representation of non-IAS officers at the JS-level goes up, the numbers at the top-most levels—additional secretaries and secretaries—too will keep changing gradually.
As a senior IAS officer serving in one of the states told ThePrint, “We are staring at a situation where even five years down the line, the central bureaucracy will look very different from what it did in the past.”
“Even now, the numbers point towards a drastic change in the trend.”
From the Modi government’s attempts to break the dominance of the IAS to IAS officers’ own unwillingness to come to the Centre, civil servants attribute the shift to a number of factors. Yet, one thing is clear—after 10 years of the Modi government, being an IAS officer is no longer a guarantee of rising to the top in the bureaucracy.
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A two-way stream
IAS officers attribute the change to a deliberate attempt under the Modi government to cut the IAS to size.
“When the Modi government came to power at the Centre, the IAS was seen as the vestige of the older system that this government wanted to dismantle,” said a retired officer, requesting anonymity. “Therefore, conscious efforts were made to ensure more and more officers from railways, revenue, accounts, etc. are empanelled. We saw this coming for a long time,” he said, referring to the numbers.
Another retired officer, who also requested anonymity, said that this government has had an attitude of suspicion towards IAS officers, who work with both the central and the state governments. “If an officer is coming from West Bengal, for instance, there will be doubts on whether he is loyal to the West Bengal government,” the officer said.
“IAS officers by definition have political flexibility unlike officers of the railways, revenue and other services, who report to the Centre from the beginning to the end of their careers…They are entirely the creatures of the Centre, so it is easier for the government to get them to do its bidding,” the officer added.
The Modi dispensation’s scepticism towards IAS officers is not entirely a matter of speculation. On the floor of Parliament in 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticised the “babu culture” for being a separate “power centre”.
“Sab kuch babu hi karenge. IAS ban gaye matlab woh fertiliser ka kaarkhana bhi chalayega, chemical ka kaarkhana bhi chalayega, IAS ho gaya toh woh hawai jahaz bhi chalayega. Yeh kaunsi badi taakat bana kar rakh di hai humne? Babuon ke haath mein desh de karke hum kya karne waale hain? Humare babu bhi toh desh ke hain, toh desh ka naujawan bhi toh desh ka hai,” Modi had said.
(Babus will do everything. By dint of becoming IAS officers, they’ll operate fertiliser warehouses and also chemical warehouses, even fly aeroplanes. What is this big power we have created? What are we going to achieve by handing the reins of the nation to babus. Our babus are also citizens, and so are the youth of India.)
The government’s lateral entry reform, too, has been seen as an attempt to break the monopoly of IAS officers, often seen as being generalists, in administrative positions.
‘IAS officers’ own reluctance’
However, some officers argue that an equally important factor behind the dramatic shift in the IAS’s fortunes under the Modi government is the officers’ own reluctance to come to the Centre.
K.B.S. Sidhu, a retired IAS officer, says this is the “biggest reason”, and attributes the officers’ reluctance to disempowerment. “Under this government, many IAS officers feel disempowered because they feel all the decision-making is concentrated at the top…The position of the JS has become a little meaningless in comparison to what it used to be 10 years ago, when all the policy-making and even intellectual argumentation over policies used to happen at this level,” he added.
“In such a situation, an IAS officer thinks it is better to be in the state itself,” he added.
Sidhu’s point is corroborated by the several letters written by the Centre to state governments to send IAS officers on deputation. As of last year, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) informed a parliamentary panel that only 442 IAS officers were working with the Centre, against the required strength of 1,469 officers, The Hindu reported.
“As Centre-state relations have plummeted in the last few years, the bureaucracy has become completely politicised too,” the officer quoted above said. “States don’t want to relieve their officers for central deputation either.”
In a controversial attempt to circumvent this problem, the Centre proposed an amendment to the All India Service (AIS) Rules in 2022 that would have done away with the no-objection clearance from the state government, which an officer needs before coming to the Centre on deputation.
The proposal triggered a political storm, and was subsequently put in cold storage.
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‘Baby steps to end discrimination’
The IAS officers’ reluctance to come to the Centre is not shared by their non-IAS counterparts. “Officers of services like the IRS, etc., which do not have state cadres, have no stability of postings. They can be posted anywhere,” said Sidhu. “For them, being in Delhi and having a few years of stability here is a promising proposition…So they are more than happy to work on deputation.”
Yet, a close analysis of the batches of the joint secretaries shows a huge disparity between IAS and non-IAS officers, which still persists.
The youngest batch of the IAS whose officers have been appointed as JS is the 2008 batch. For all other services, it is 2003. Meanwhile, the oldest batch of the IAS whose officers have been appointed as JS is the 1997 batch. For other services, it is the 1988 batch.
This means that while IAS officers climb up the hierarchical ladder quickly, their non-IAS counterparts take many more years to do so.
Other services have long complained of discrimination in the rules of empanelment, which favour the IAS. For instance, while IAS officers require 32 years of experience in service to be eligible for secretary-level positions in the central government, their counterparts require over 34-35 years, before which most officers retire.
Moreover, according to current government rules, the eligibility criteria for IAS officers to be empanelled for a certain position is two years less than their counterparts from other services under the Central Staffing Scheme—an advantage seen as discriminatory by the others.
Officers of other services say that even the Seventh Pay Commission had recommended that there should be parity between empanelment rules for the IAS vis-à-vis other services. However, nothing has yet been done to that effect.
“It is a welcome change from the government’s end that they are using domain expertise within the government, and appointing officers from other services,” a railway service officer said. “Earlier, it would have been unimaginable to even think that non-IAS officers could dominate the numbers in this fashion.”
Yet, the government should tweak the rules to institutionalise this change, or it will be turned around by the “IAS lobby”, he said.
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