I ran into a colleague at a social function recently, and what came up as we got talking has stayed with me since. Ten IAS officers of the 2024 batch, by most reckoning the largest cohort assigned to Punjab in 30 years or more, have completed their Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) probation and district training. Not one of them has been posted as Sub-Divisional Magistrate. All 10 have instead been attached to their Deputy Commissioners as Officer on Special Duty, Urban Affairs. OSD is a designation more often used to park an officer awaiting posting than to assign one real work.
These officers have been selected out of the several lakh who sit the Civil Services Examination each year for one of 180 seats. I’m told that the number of seats has remained the same since 2012.
I am withholding my colleague’s name and posting history, at their request. What follows draws on what they told me, and on my own years as Deputy Commissioner, Financial Commissioner Revenue, Chief Administrator of PUDA, and Joint Secretary, Housing and Urban Affairs.
The office with a rudder
The Sub-Divisional Magistrate holds magisterial powers under the criminal law, collector’s powers under the land law, and supervisory charge of the Tehsil and Development Block beneath. The SDM is also Returning Officer at Assembly elections, Land Acquisition Collector when the State needs land, registering authority for a hundred kinds of deeds, and the first point of contact when a citizen’s grievance runs from a disputed boundary to an unregistered death. Three things an SDM has that an OSD does not: a jurisdiction, a statute, and a queue outside the door.
Put differently — and here I will allow myself the one metaphor this piece needs — the SDM’s post is a ship, however modest the tonnage: a hull, a rudder, a crew, a course to steer, and open water on which to run aground and learn from it. An OSD posting, however dignified the file cover, is a wheel bolted to a wall. Turn it as often as you like. Nothing moves.
My colleague’s own first months illustrate exactly what is being denied to this year’s 10. As an Assistant Commissioner Under Training (ACUT, that peculiar acronym under which every one of us has done our early penance), their Deputy Commissioner found a Block Development and Panchayat Officer’s post lying vacant and simply handed it over: here is an office, a jeep, a staff and an agenda; go and run it. No one asked whether the officer was ready. The post made them ready.
Samrala, Dhar Kalan, and the two years
My own first charge was Samrala, one of a handful of Punjab subdivisions that cadre convention, not statute, marked out as an “IAS subdivision” for direct recruits. Every such subdivision carries its own folklore. Samrala’s included IAS officer Rakesh Singh (1978 batch), later Chief Secretary, Punjab, and Amitabha Pande before him. Both are names any officer of my generation would recognise.
Dhar Kalan carries a version of the same lore: carved out of the old Pathankot subdivision, for years the state’s smallest, and traditionally the freshest officer’s first charge: few villages, thin establishment, no glamour, but a magistrate’s court and citizens expecting a real answer. I don’t believe an officer of my experience could not name a similar subdivision of their own.
What none of us had to contend with was a truncated tenure. We joined on 1 July, giving us full two years in the chair, long enough for the incoming batch to be trained and ready to step in by the time we left. Today’s recruits join on 1 January, which trims the same charge to about 18 months, even in years when it is given at all.
The erosion started with the calendar, years before the batch of 2024 arrived. This year’s 10 are simply the first batch for whom it ran out entirely. Even the smallest, shortest SDM-ship is still a ship. An OSD’s desk, however large the district, has no vessel attached to it.
OSD—officer, sans duty?
I spent three years as Chief Administrator of Punjab Urban Planning and Development Authority (PUDA) and, later, as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, helping draft what became the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA). No one needs to convince me that urban governance matters, or that it is increasingly the site of Punjab’s hardest administrative problems. If the government wants 10 fresh minds thinking about urban affairs, I am the last person to object.
But that is not what an OSD (Urban Affairs) posting delivers, and everyone who has held or supervised one knows it. Where is the file that defines this officer’s agenda? Which municipal body reports to them, under what statute? What decision can they take that does not first require someone else’s signature? At best, each OSD will be just another staff officer attached to the Deputy Commissioner of the district, one more name on the list. They are being kept in a waiting room with an impressive nameplate on the door, and Punjab’s Municipal Committees and Corporations are no better administered for it.
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Hand them the wheel
Administrative reasons behind this year’s posting orders may not be apparent from outside the file. If so, the government owes these 10 officers, and the service, an explanation. What is at stake is the quality of administration in Punjab. A decade from now, when these officers will become Deputy Commissioners and Financial Commissioners themselves, they wouldn’t have the learned ropes one does in the early years of the service. You cannot learn grievance redressal without facing the public, crisis management from a briefing note, or what a revenue order costs a family by reading it after someone else has signed it.
The state must give each of the 10 a jurisdiction. Give them a statute to administer and a public that knows where their office is. Give them the ship (however small the tonnage, however unglamorous the subdivision) rather than a wheel with nothing behind it. That is how this service has always made administrators. I see no reason, none yet offered, why the 2024 batch should be the first asked to learn it standing at the dock.
The author is a retired IAS officer of the 1984 batch, Punjab cadre, who superannuated as Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
The 1981 batch had just two. Dhanbir Singh Bains, a very lanky figure, and Ms Anjuli Chibb. A highly sought after cadre. At the other end of the spectrum lay the north east, not a pleasing prospect for outsiders.