The concept of All India Services needs to be re-examined

The chief minister of West Bengal, the redoubtable Mamata Banerjee, gleefully takes every opportunity to make a fuss. She is reported to have done it again.

In doing so she has provided other opposition party chief ministers too, to raise a chorus of protest. They will join in soon.

She has written a two page letter to the prime minister saying the Centre has no right to snaffle IAS officers from the states, as it is proposing to do now, by amending the IAS (Cadre) Rules, 1954 which would enable it to take these officers on central deputation.

I am not going to quote the exact rule because it’s wording is quite incomprehensible. Suffice it to say that the amendment will leave neither the officers, nor their states the option to refuse to go over to the central government.

The letter, it’s reported, says that if the centre goes ahead with the amendment, the administration of the states will be affected — as if it’s something to write home about now. It adds that the amendment runs counter to the "spirit of cooperative federalism"— whatever that is, under our peculiar Constitution.

Peculiar because it is like Schroedinger’s cat which was in two states simultaneously — alive and dead. Likewise, our constitution is both unitary and federal depending on your preference that day.

West Bengal, it seems, has around 270 IAS officers but only 11 were posted with the Centre as of 2021. This, if you ask me, doesn’t suggest that the officers’ wishes were taken into account by the state government. Otherwise, there would be at least 15-17 per cent of them on deputation to the Centre. That they aren’t could well be because the chief minister is practising non-cooperative federalism.

The way things are now the Centre recruits the IAS officers and allocates them to different states. The officers are thus expected to serve two masters.

This duality lies at the heart of the concept of an All India Service. But how can it be that when, in fact, the officers are captives of chief ministers? This is even more so in the case of the Indian Police Service which is another All India Service.

The rights of the states and its IAS officers are clearly defined: they can refuse to be sent or go on deputation, respectively. The state can say they can’t be spared and the officers can say thanks very much but I am ok where I am.

One result of this peculiar approach has been that for the last several years, and certainly since 2015 when stricter integrity norms were applied, the Centre has been short-staffed at the joint secretary level. The shortage of professionally capable IAS officers has made things worse. Thus, both sides are responsible for the shortage.

It’s not clear how transfers without an option will solve the problems of competence and integrity. The pool is not just small; it’s also not what it used to be morally.

That’s why this is a good opportunity to think of two deeper and long term issues. One is the very concept of an All India Service. The other is the integrity, competence and aptitude of an officer.

The idea of an All India Service is at cross purposes with its actuality. It needs to be reviewed comprehensively.

As for integrity and aptitude, one is a matter of personal choice, and the other depends very largely on educational backgrounds.

But all this is in the future. For the moment the Centre has run out of options. It tried to fill the gaps at the joint secretary level by co-opting persons from the other services. That worked for a while but now the limits of even that have been reached.

Whence the move to amend the rules of deputation. Let’s wait and see where this goes.