Centre rejigs cadre allocation policy for IAS, IPS and IFoS

NEW DELHI: In a major move, the Centre has introduced a new policy for allocation of cadres to civil servants of three key central services with the introduction of new groupings for their postings, among others. In the recently issued policy for the officers of Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Forest Service (IFoS), it said that ministries concerned will determine the vacancies on the basis of “cadre gap” as on January 1 of a year. The cadre or joint cadre refers to a state or group of states or Union territories allocated to the officers of these three services, also known as all India services. It has abolished the earlier five zones’ system for allocation of cadres and introduced new groupings in which “all the state cadres/joint cadres have been arranged in alphabetical order and divided into four groups”. Group-I has AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory), Andhra Pradesh, Assam-Meghalaya, Bihar and Chhattisgarh, and Group-II includes Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh. Group-III comprises Maharashtra, Manipur, Nagaland, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim and Tamil Nadu, whereas Group-IV has Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, according to the policy issued by the Union Personnel Ministry on January 23.

The cadre-controlling authorities, namely, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) / Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) / Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEF&CC) shall determine the vacancies, including the break-up into unreserved (UR)/ Scheduled Caste (SC) / Scheduled Tribe (ST) / Other Backward Classes (OBC)/ Insider/ Outsider vacancies for each of the cadres. The cadre-wise/category-wise vacancies will be determined on the basis of the “cadre gap as on the 1st January of the year following the examination year”. The IAS, IPS and IFoS officers are shortlisted through a three-layer civil services examination. The state governments shall indicate the total number of vacancies to be filled through a particular civil services examination (CSE)/Indian Forest Service examination latest by the 31st January of the year following the year of examination. In respect of the services under them, the respective cadre-controlling authorities shall determine the vacancies including the break-up into different categories (ie, UR/SC/ST/OBC) “keeping in mind the cadre gap in the cadre, the requisitions received from the state governments and the position of the rosters in the cadre”. The vacancies reserved for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) category for recruitment, shall be considered a part of the UR vacancies only, it said. The vacancies so determined would be communicated to the state governments and published on the respective ministry’s website. Both the actions may preferably be completed before the announcement of the final result of the civil services examination/Indian Forest Service examination on the basis of which the recruitment is to be made, the policy read.