From CK Nayak
NEW DELHI: Many IAS officers of the North East and Jammu and Kashmir cadres are opting for transfer to mainland states despite extra salary and other benefits, according to official sources here.
As many as 74 IAS officers have secured cadre transfer since January 2014, the Department of Personnel and training (DoPT) data said.
Jitendra Singh, the present minister for DOPT and DoNER (North East), is from Jammu and Kashmir.
No IAS officers from other cadres have opted for transfer to the North East or J&K during this period, the sources said.
This is despite the fact that such officers get about one-fourth of their salary more and retain both official residences.
The Centre had been toying with the idea of a new policy for cadre allocation in case of IAS and IPS officers for “national integration” in the country’s top bureaucracy.
As per the change, officers of all-India services — the IAS, IPS and Indian Forest Service (IFS) — will have to choose cadres from a set of zones instead of states.
The officers of the three services are at present 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 Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.
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, and Zone-III comprises Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam-Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Nagaland constitute Zone-IV.
The last zone has Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
The new policy will seek to ensure that officers from Uttar Pradesh, 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, it was then argued.
Moreover, the number of IAS and IPS officers hailing from the North East and Jammu and Kashmir are also very less for various reasons.
Despite all these constraints, states like Meghalaya are demanding for exclusive cadre for the state ever since such states have got separate High Courts.