From Andhra Pradesh to Uttar Pradesh, state bureaucracy becomes top heavy

In all the major states, there are now dozens of chief secretaries and director generals of police, or DGPs. This has happened because few senior Indian Administrative Service (IAS) or other All India Service officers are willing to come to the Centre to head ministries and departments. 

Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) data shows only a few cadres from Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories (AGMUT), and from the Northeast, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar form 30 per cent of the officers at senior administrative grade serving at the Centre. 

Chief secretaries and DGPs are the two senior-most administrative positions in any state government. But in each of the 28 states, thanks to rapid and time-bound promotions, there are at least a dozen or more of them sitting in the state secretariats. 

As the table shows, in states like Uttar Pradesh there are now 30 such officers; Karnataka and West Bengal have 20 each. It means all the key departments of these state governments are headed by officers with the same seniority. This means the additional chief secretaries have no particular reason to obey the orders of anyone who is just notionally deemed superior.

The overcrowding at the senior level has also happened because while promotions at the senior management level are supposed to be guided by merit, it is a rare chief minister who will set out to displease any senior officer. So everyone with the relevant number of years of service, unless debarred by vigilance cases, gets promoted. Also, while there is a concept of fixed pay for the top job, it has got diluted since those in the top rank get a scale of pay that puts all of them within earshot to get pay parity. 

Consequently, many secretaries in states have got themselves redesigned as principal secretaries. Now in each state government, the cohort of principal secretaries has en masse climbed to become chief secretaries. In the case of police, it was evident in the promotion from the rank of inspector general of police to that of DGP.

The trend has also robbed the Centre of a valuable talent pool. All India Services have the experience of having worked in districts. No other equivalent pool of officers has a corresponding experience. This is because officers of central services acquire specialisation in different subjects like law, taxation and audit instead. 

The bloated numbers at the top have reduced the efficiency of state administrations, both for maintaining law and order and to have development works reach the people. For administrative purposes, the state chief minister designates one of the senior most as the chief secretary, but surrounding her sit a set of officers designated additional chief secretaries who are her batch mates and often who will retire on the same date as her. 

The risk was recognised by the Seventh Pay Commission, the body set up every 10 years by the central and state governments to revise pay and allowances for their employees. Commenting about the Indian Police Service (IPS), it wrote; “Quite often selection to the post of Head of Police Force (HoPF) is not done on the basis of seniority and HoPFs are sometimes transferred out without adhering to the two-year tenure rule. Situations have arisen when an apex scale DGP, who is HoPF is removed to a post carrying the inferior Higher Administrative Grade (HAG) scale and his pay scale is reduced from apex to HAG.”