Every year on 31 October, Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary, the nation pays tribute to him on National Unity Day, Rashtriya Ekta Diwas. It is worth recalling what the architect of the all-India services told the Constituent Assembly on 10 October 1949: “The Union will go—you will not have a united India if you have not a good all-India service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has a sense of security that you will stand by your word.” Independence and security go together, and both rest on rules that apply to everyone alike.
This year, as tributes were being paid to the Sardar, three of the Republic’s senior-most officers reached the date every government servant knows is coming from the day they join service. Two of them went home, without the traditional fanfare associated with such departures. The third stayed on.
Air Chief Marshal AP Singh superannuated without the customary ‘golfing out’ that marks the end of an Air Chief’s tenure. The Air Force Sports Complex on Lok Kalyan Marg, of which the Chief of the Air Staff is patron-in-chief, had been sealed by the Land and Development Office three days earlier. Singh had flagged his concerns in writing to the Defence Minister before he left.
The same day, Shatrujeet Kapur, a 1990-batch IPS officer, also retired. He had been relieved of charge as Haryana’s DGP after being named in the suicide note of fellow officer Y Puran Kumar, and was subsequently sent to head the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which guards our long frontier with Tibet.
Kapur did not go quietly either. On 22 October, nine days before he retired, he told ITBP personnel at a ceremony in Alwar that face-offs had taken place at several locations in Arunachal Pradesh and were still continuing. He praised the force’s newly raised Shaurya commando teams for their part in them. The ITBP posted the video of his address and then took it down, but not before the Opposition seized on it to ask why the government had been silent about the frontier. Arunachal’s Chief Minister later played it down, saying transgressions happen on both sides from time to time because China does not recognise the McMahon Line. Rarely has a serving head of a border force said so much in public about an ongoing face-off, and on his way out.
Whatever one makes of these episodes, the uniformed officers left on the day the rules said they would. However, when Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh’s two-year term also ended on 31 October, he received an extension for another year.
With that order, all three of the Union’s senior-most IAS posts—Cabinet Secretary, Home Secretary and Defence Secretary—are held by officers on extension.
Let me be clear at the outset: all three officers—TV Somanathan, Govind Mohan and Singh—are professionally competent, have fine track records and are well respected by their peers. The question is about the system, which has made extensions look like the norm. When the exception becomes the norm, it is no longer an exception. It becomes a system, and a system deserves scrutiny.
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Three extensions
TV Somanathan of the Tamil Nadu cadre, 1987 batch, became Cabinet Secretary on 30 August 2024 for two years. On 5 August this year, the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) extended his tenure by a year, to 30 August 2027.
The same day, Home Secretary Govind Mohan (Sikkim, 1989) received his second extension. He took charge on 23 August 2024 and would otherwise have retired on 30 September 2025.
His first extension ran to 22 August 2026; the second stretches to 22 August 2027, “or until further orders, whichever is earlier”, in relaxation of Fundamental Rule 56(d) and Rule 16(1A) of the All India Services (Death-cum-Retirement Benefits) Rules, 1958.
Rajesh Kumar Singh (Kerala, 1989) took over at South Block on 1 November 2024. On 24 October, his tenure was extended to 31 October 2027, with the same phrase about further orders.
The result is that all three chairs will fall vacant within ten weeks of each other, between August and October 2027, unless the government extends them yet again.
The rule, and the relaxation
The rule book is clear: under Fundamental Rule (FR) 56(d) and Rule 16(1) of the All India Services (Death-cum-Retirement Benefits) Rules, 1958, or AIS (DCRB) Rules for short, no one is retained beyond sixty. Rule 16(1A) carves out a short list of posts: Cabinet Secretary, Defence Secretary, Home Secretary, Director of the Intelligence Bureau, Secretary (R&AW) and Director, CBI. Read plainly, it contemplates a term of two years. For every one of these posts but one, the total term, extensions included, may not exceed two years. Only the Cabinet Secretary may go up to four. FR 56(d) has a separate proviso for officers dealing with budget work, but that allows no more than three months.
The history of these provisos is instructive. In 2005, the Union Cabinet gave the Home and Defence Secretaries and the IB and R&AW chiefs a fixed two-year tenure. The purpose was protection: an officer appointed a few months before sixty would still get his full two years and could not be shunted out at the government’s convenience. In 2011, a proviso allowed three months beyond those two years. In June 2019, another proviso allowed the Cabinet Secretary three months beyond four years, which enabled PK Sinha to stay on through the general election. In November 2021, the Fundamental Rules were amended so that the Home and Defence Secretaries, and the IB and R&AW chiefs, could be extended by up to two further years. And in August 2023, the rules were simply relaxed to give Rajiv Gauba a fifth year as Cabinet Secretary.
Note the phrase that now recurs in almost every order: in relaxation of. The power to relax a rule exists to relieve individual hardship in an unusual case. It has become the principal instrument for retaining officers at the top. When the rule must be relaxed every year, it is fair to ask whether there is still a rule.
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The precedents
A four-year tenure for a Cabinet Secretary is not new. KM Chandrasekhar (2007-2011) and Ajit Seth (2011-2015) each served about four years; Seth received one extension from the UPA and two from the NDA. PK Sinha served from 2015 to 2019, plus the three months the 2019 amendment allowed. Rajiv Gauba served a full five years, from August 2019 to August 2024, overtaking BD Pande as the longest-serving Cabinet Secretary.
Meanwhile, from 2005 to 2019, Home Secretaries generally served their two years and retired — the disruptions of that period were early exits, not extensions. In February 2015, Anil Goswami was eased out over his alleged attempt to stall the CBI’s arrest of a former Union minister in the Saradha case and allowed to take voluntary retirement. His successor, LC Goyal, left in August 2015, barely seven months into his two-year term, on a ‘voluntary retirement’ the Home Minister said he could not explain. He was replaced by Finance Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, hours before Mehrishi was due to turn sixty: an early instance of the protected term carrying an officer past superannuation.
The Finance Ministry had its own exits. Revenue Secretary Rajiv Takru was moved out in June 2014 and Economic Affairs Secretary Arvind Mayaram in October that year; in July 2019, Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg was abruptly shifted to the Power Ministry and sought voluntary retirement the next day.
Then the pattern reversed. Ajay Kumar Bhalla, appointed Home Secretary in August 2019, received a succession of extensions that kept him in North Block for five years. Govind Mohan is now on the same path. In Defence, officers such as Giridhar Aramane were appointed close to superannuation and served out the protected term. Rajesh Kumar Singh appears to be the first in recent memory to be extended beyond the protected term itself. The exits and the extensions teach the same lesson: the two-year term protects an officer only as long as the government wishes it to.
In the next column, I shall take up the judicial pronouncements, the recommendations of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission and the impact of extensions on the morale of the batches that follow. And, of course, the clear signal they send: that political alignment is as important as, if not more important than, professional competence.
(To be continued)
This is the first 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 Prashant Dixit)