New Delhi, Jan 24 (PTI): 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.
Since this would be a time-bound exercise, the requisition received from the state governments after the deadline, as prescribed by the central government, would not be considered while determining the vacancies, it specified.
Giving details on allocation against insider vacancies (candidates opting for their home state), it said that cadre will be given on the basis of a “cycle-based” slotting system.
“For allocation to home cadre against an insider vacancy, a candidate will be required to express his/her willingness to be allocated to his/her home state/cadre, otherwise he/she shall not be considered for his/her home cadre at all,” the policy said.
The allocation against the “outsider vacancies” (vacancies earmarked for candidates outside their home state) will be done according to the roster system after placing ‘insiders’ at their proper places on the allocation chart, and will be done in two stages, ie, first for PwBD (persons with benchmark disabilities) candidates and second for other than PwBD candidates, it said.
A candidate claiming benefit of reservation under the PwBD category shall have an additional option to indicate his/her preference (at the time of indicating his home state) for any one cadre (other than home cadre), the policy said.
“This cadre allocation policy issues in supersession of the existing cadre allocation policy and comes into effect with the Civil Services Examination-2026 and Indian Forest Service Examination-2026,” it added. (PTI)
