New cadre policy for IAS, IPS officers finalised
Source: The Sangai Express / PTI
Imphal, August 23 2017:
A new policy for cadre allocation has been finalised by the Central Government for IAS, IPS and other officers, aimed at ensuring "National integration" in the country's top bureaucracy .
Officers of all-India services � the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Forest Service (IFoS) � will have to choose cadres from a set of zones instead of States.
The officers of the three services are currently allocated a cadre State or a set of States to work in.
They may be posted on Central deputation during the course of their service after fulfilling certain eligibility conditions .
The existing 26 cadres have been divided into five zones in the new policy proposed by the personnel ministry .
Zone-I has seven cadres � AGMUT (also known as Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territories), Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana .
Zone-II consists of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha, while Zone-III comprises Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh .
West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam-Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Nagaland will constitute Zone-IV, while Zone-V will have Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala .
The new policy will seek to ensure that officers from Bihar, for instance, will get to work in southern and North Eastern States, which may not be their preferred cadres, a Personnel Ministry official said .
"This policy will ensure National integration of the bureaucracy as officers will get a chance to work in a State which is not their place of domicile," the official said .
He said the new policy would help in upholding the rationale behind the all-India services .
"All-India service officers are supposed to have varied experiences which can be earned when they work in a different State, which is new to them.
The officers may not be able to experiment new things if they work in their own domicile State," the official said .
Under the new policy, candidates appearing for the civil services examination� conducted annually by the Union Public Service Commission � will have to first give their choices in a descending order of preference from among the various zones .
"Thereafter the candidates will indicate cadres in order of preference from each zone," it said.
A candidate can list all 26 cadres, following this process .
The preference for the zones will remain in the same order and no change will be permitted there, the policy said .
"If a candidate does not give any preference for any of the zones/cadres, it will be presumed that he has no specific preference for those zones/cadres," it said .
If candidates are not allocated any one of the cadres for which they have indicated a preference, they shall be allotted along with other candidates any of the remaining cadres, arranged in an alphabetical order, where there are vacancies, the policy said .
Candidates will be allotted their home cadre on the basis of merit, preference and vacancy in the category, it said .
The official said the policy is likely to be put into effect from this year.