NEW ALLOCATION POLICY FOR CADRE

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. 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.

Presently, officers of the three services are allocated a cadre state or a set of states to work in. They may be posted on Central deputation during 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), J&K, 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.