Dearth of Assamese IAS officers: The situation needs brain racking

Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI: IAS officers are the ones who control the administrative mechanism in a state. Assam produces fewer IAS officers from its soil than UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Haryana. As a result, the Assamese people lack a strong influence over the state’s administrative control. Strangely enough, Assam could not produce a single IAS officer after 2020.

The moot question is: why has Assam not consistently produced top-ranking candidates in the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) like other states? The lack of dedicated coaching centres and the absence of a strong culture of civil service aspirations among the youth in the state contribute to the dismal situation. The youth and their parents in Assam mainly prefer engineering and medical sciences to other courses.

When contacted, former Assam Chief Secretary Kumar Sanjay Krishna said that Article 32 of the Constitution provides for Parliament to create services common to both the Union and States. “The philosophy behind All India Services is to ensure national unity and administrative cohesion, promote impartiality and continuity, bridge the gap between central policy and state implementation, counter separatist tendencies and reduce political interference through central recruitment and control,” he said.

Sanjay Krishna said, “This service was created by Sardar Patel to bind a diverse nation by having a common pool of officers serving across the states. Assam produced several IAS officers in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but surprisingly, Assam produced very few IAS officers between 1990 and 2009, in almost 20 years. Though three candidates qualified during this period, they were allotted Orissa, Kerala and Chhattisgarh as cadres, depriving Assam of their services. Because of this non-availability of insiders in IAS in Assam, today there is no local officer in the rank of principal secretary and above except L. Sweety Changsan. It is likely that Paban Borthakur will remain the last Chief Secretary belonging to Assam who had roots in Assam for a very long time. The creation of ‘Insider’ and ‘Outsider’ categories in IAS is rooted in a deliberate philosophy aimed at balancing local knowledge with national integration, maintaining neutrality and ensuring uniform administrative standards across India.”

He said, “There is always a question asked why candidates from Assam are not qualifying for IAS/IPS, etc. One must remember the civil services examination is not a qualifying examination but a competitive examination. One must qualify out of 10 lakh candidates in the preliminary examination and then come in the first 500 out of 10,000 candidates to qualify for Class I services. One must be focused, hard-working with excellence in academics, and mentally strong to get selected. Probably, students from Assam are not as focused as students from other states.”

Sanjay Krishna said, “Though there are nowadays more opportunities available in private sectors than what was available in the 1980s and 1990s, it is important for students to aspire to civil services, which give opportunities to serve the people of a developing country directly. The service also provides a variety of experiences in working in many fields. In my career, I gained experience working in 15 different departments, including Home, Finance, Commerce, etc., in addition to my roles in the PMO and as a DC and Managing Director. Can any private sector provide such wide experience to one person in 35 years of service?”

Udayan Hazarika, a retired IAS officer, stated that the appointment of an officer as chief secretary takes into account various factors. “There is no set tenure for a chief secretary. In all India services, the promotion at different levels is considered batch-wise. An officer usually becomes eligible for the post of chief secretary after serving for 25-30 years,” he said.

Hazarika said, “After the retirement of Paban Kumar Borthakur as Chief Secretary, there appears to be a slim chance for an Assamese officer in the IAS cadre to get appointed as the chief secretary.”

According to Hazarika, it will take at least 20 years for any of the existing Assamese IAS officers in the state administration to be the chief secretary. All the existing Assamese IAS officers in the state administration – Varnali Deka, Biswajit Pegu, Narayan Konwar, Diwakar Nath, Bikram Kairi, and Aranyak Saikia – are of batches between 2009 and 2020. To be chosen as the chief secretary of the state, these Assamese IAS officers will face steep competition from their non-Assamese batchmates in the Assam-Meghalaya cadre. 

A vacuum of top-level Assamese civil servants is lurking in the state for the next 10–15 years. At present, the state has around 25 nominated or promoted IAS officers hailing from Assam. But their age bar limits them to the commissioner level.

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