When on June 14 evening the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) notified the list of 32 IAS officers for empanelment at the Additional Secretary level, the WhatsApp group of Odisha IAS officers became hyperactive with messages of congratulations for the three successful mandarins, who were listed in the list.
Asit Tripathy, GVV Sarma and lN Gupta found places in the empanelment notification of the Government of India. While
Tripathy is now Home Principal Secretary, Sarma is serving in the Department of Higher Education as Principal Secretary and Gupta is Principal Secretary of the Department of Skill Development and Technical Education.
All the three senior IAS officers have served as Joint Secretaries in various Union Ministries completing full term with competence.
Though there are 120 IAS officers in the 1986 batch, only 32 have been empanelled in the AS rank. In Odisha, there are five IAS officers of the 1986 batch out of which three have been promoted.
The other two officers of the batch are Suresh Chandra Mohapatra and Sudarshan Pal Thakur. Both, though efficient mandarins, have not served as Joint Secretaries in the Union Government, for which they are not listed this time in the list, feel insiders.
While Mohapatra feels at home to serve in Odisha, Thakur has served in the capacity of the CVO in Central PSUs and in the rank of Director in the National Institutes learning under the Government of India.
What is intriguing is less and less numbers of IAS officers are being empanelled in the AS rank. While only 32 officers received empanelment in 2016, a total of 54 officers of the 1985 batch got empanelment in 2015 and 45 of the 1984 batch were empanelled in 2014.
Some mandarins feel that as the Union Government is accommodating more numbers of other All India Service (AIS) officers in the rank of Joint Secretary, less numbers of IAS officers are picked up for the AS rank.
After accepting to the recommendations of the Fourteenth Finance Commission, the Union Government is trying to bring parity on promotion and pay of all the Indain Administrative Servixces officers, said sources.