In the first part of this column, I looked at how extensions for the Cabinet, Home and Defence Secretaries have moved from exception to routine. This part looks at who pays the price. The cost of extensions does not fall on the officer who is extended. It falls on everyone below him.
Rajiv Gauba, who served five years as Cabinet Secretary until August 2024, was of the 1982 batch. His successor, TV Somanathan, is of the 1987 batch. The 1983 to 1986 batches, in effect, never had a turn at the Cabinet Secretary’s chair. Ajay Kumar Bhalla, who served as Home Secretary over roughly the same period, was of the 1984 batch. His successor, Govind Mohan, is of the 1989 batch. Four batches were skipped there as well. This is not new either. Extensions kept KM Chandrasekhar of the 1970 batch in the Cabinet Secretary’s chair from 2007 to 2011. This meant that Sudha Pillai of the 1972 batch did not become India’s first woman Cabinet Secretary.
When extensions happen at every turn, an entire generation of officers, who have spent 35 years in service, retire without being considered at all for top jobs.
The present round compounds the problem. With officers of the 1989 batch holding both Home and Defence until late 2027, many officers of the 1989, 1990 and 1991 batches will retire before these chairs fall vacant. Somanathan, meanwhile, remains within the four-year cap until August 2028.
The effect cascades down the line. When the Cabinet Secretary or Home Secretary moves on, a Secretary moves up, an Additional Secretary becomes Secretary, and a Joint Secretary moves up in turn. Freeze the top and the chain freezes. Officers empanelled as Secretary wait, and many reach their posts with only months of service left. That is too short to own a policy, let alone see it through.
The Second Administrative Reforms Commission noticed this pattern nearly two decades ago and argued that officers should be assessed for top positions early enough to give them meaningful tenure. Extensions push in the opposite direction.
There is a subtler cost. The two-year fixed tenure was designed to dilute the doctrine of pleasure. An officer who knew he had two years could tender frank advice. An officer whose tenure is renewed one year at a time, “until further orders”, is in a different position. Every year he is, in effect, on probation. No one need doubt the integrity of the present incumbents to see that the arrangement itself is unhealthy. The protection has been turned on its head.
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The states follow suit
What Delhi does, the states copy. Rule 16(1) of the All India Services Rules allows a state Chief Secretary to serve up to six months beyond sixty, on the state’s recommendation and with the Centre’s approval. That limit is now routinely exceeded through relaxation.
In Haryana, Anurag Rastogi of the 1990 batch was given a year’s extension from July 2025, “in relaxation of Rule 16(1) of AIS (DCRB) Rules, 1958 by invoking Rule 3 of AIS (CS-RM) Rules, 1960”. That dashed the hopes of four 1990-batch and five 1991-batch officers. A second extension of six months, to December 2026, followed. At least four senior officers, including two of his own batchmates, will retire before it ends.
Similarly, Uttar Pradesh’s DS Mishra had three extensions spanning two and a half years. Odisha and Himachal Pradesh have extended their Chief Secretaries too. Each case may have its reasons. Together, they form a pattern.
West Bengal shows the other variant: appoint late, then extend. After the change of government in May, Manoj Kumar Agarwal of the 1990 batch was made Chief Secretary on 11 May, less than three months before he was due to retire on 31 July. As Chief Electoral Officer, he had overseen the Special Intensive Revision and the Assembly election. Before he reached sixty, the Centre had already cleared a six-month extension, to 31 January 2027. If a second follows, most of his time in the chair will have been served on extension. Nor is this new to Bengal. Former Chief Secretaries Manoj Pant, HK Dwivedi and BP Gopalika were all given extensions too. When an officer is picked for the top post with weeks of service left, the extension is not an exception granted later. It is built into the appointment.
What the courts have said
The irony is that the Supreme Court has spent three decades building up the idea of fixed tenure that the extension regime now turns upside down.
In Vineet Narain (1997), the hawala case, the court gave the CBI Director a minimum tenure of two years and placed the agency under the supervision of the Central Vigilance Commission, so that the investigator could be neither removed nor rewarded at the government’s pleasure. In Prakash Singh (2006), it applied the same logic to the police. DGPs and officers in key field posts were to have a minimum tenure of two years. Later orders in that case required DGPs to be chosen from a UPSC panel of officers with reasonable residual service, a recognition that a chief with weeks to go is hardly a chief at all.
And in TSR Subramanian (2013), brought by a former Cabinet Secretary, the court asked the Centre and the states to fix minimum tenures for civil servants and set up Civil Services Boards to oversee postings, and insisted that officers act on written rather than oral instructions.
The thread running through all three is that security of tenure protects the officer from the executive, so that he can serve the public rather than his political masters. An extension granted one year at a time does the opposite.
When the Supreme Court has looked at extensions directly, it has said as much. In Common Cause (2021), dealing with the Director of Enforcement, it held that extensions beyond superannuation should be granted only in rare and exceptional cases. In July 2023, in Jaya Thakur, it held the second and third extensions of the ED Director illegal. The same principle applies to civil servants: tenure is a shield for the officer, not a leash in the hands of the government.
The need for a better pipeline
None of this is new to those who have studied the problem. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, chaired by M Veerappa Moily, devoted its tenth report, Refurbishing of Personnel Administration (2008), to these questions. It recommended a fixed minimum tenure for civil servants, a Central Civil Services Authority to oversee postings and transfers, and a Civil Services Law to put the whole framework on a statutory footing, in place of executive instructions that can be amended or relaxed at will. To build a stronger pipeline, it proposed two intensive reviews of every officer, at 14 and 20 years of service. Those found unfit at 20 years were to be eased out; the rest were to be assessed for the domains in which they would serve at senior levels. It also suggested opening senior posts to wider competition, including from outside government.
The logic was simple. If officers are tested early and placed on merit, the government will never be short of capable successors, and no incumbent need be treated as indispensable. Nearly two decades on, the Civil Services Law has not been enacted, and minimum tenure survives largely because the Supreme Court enforced it in TSR Subramanian. What has flourished instead is something the Commission never contemplated: the extension as a matter of routine.
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What should be done
Continuity is a legitimate value. A government in the middle of a census, a security transition or a major procurement programme may well want a trusted officer to stay. But continuity can be secured honestly.
There is a simpler answer, and it costs nothing. The date of superannuation is not a state secret. It is known from the day an officer joins service, and printed in every gradation list. Nothing prevents the government from naming the successor three months ahead and posting him as an Officer on Special Duty in the ministry to learn the ropes. The practice is not unknown: Govind Mohan himself served as OSD in the Home Ministry for about a week in August 2024 before taking charge. Stretch that week to a quarter, and the argument for continuity largely answers itself.
An extension, by contrast, carries two implications, neither of them flattering to the system. The first is that the incumbent is indispensable to the political executive. That runs against the grain of a civil service that is meant to be rule-based and impersonal, where authority belongs to the post, not the person. The second is that no one in the batches below him is competent enough to hold the post. For a service that recruits through one of the most demanding examinations in the world and then grooms its officers for three decades, that is a strange admission for any government to make.
First, if the government wants a Cabinet Secretary for four years, it should appoint him for four years, choosing an officer with that much service left, and say so in the order. A fixed term protects an officer. Annual renewal makes him dependent.
Second, selection for the apex posts should reach down far enough that officers come in with residual service to match the job, as the Administrative Reforms Commission urged.
Third, every extension should carry recorded reasons, and these should be published. If the case is sound, it will survive scrutiny.
Patel asked for two things of an all-India service: the independence to speak its mind, and a sense of security. Both rest on two certainties: a tenure the officer can count on, and a date of retirement no one can bargain over. An extension regime chips away at both. The most fitting tribute on Rashtriya Ekta Diwas would be to remember that the steel frame was built to bear weight. It was not built to be renewed one year at a time.
This is the second of a two-part series on the growing practice of granting extensions to India’s top civil servants.
Sanjeev Chopra is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Prime Ministers Museum and Library (PMML), New Delhi, where his Fellowship topic is Borders, Boundaries and Bluewaters of Bharat. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)