As a Valentine’s Day gift to married IAS, IPS and IFS couples, the Centre on Tuesday amended the service rules to mandatorily allow them to be in same cadre. However, they will not be allotted a cadre which is the home State of either of them. The amendment was cleared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) chaired by him.
The new rules have come as a relief to several young civil servants running from pillar to post to change their cadres. The decision to amend the rules was triggered by the case of 2011-batch IAS officer P Parthiban, who married his batchmate and Tamil Nadu cadre IPS officer Nisha, hailing from Delhi. Parthiban is a native of Tamil Nadu and has been allocated AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories) cadre, which includes Delhi.
As there was no provision for all India services officers to opt for the cadre of their spouse being their respective home cadre. According to a senior DoPT official, after the amendment to the rules, Parthiban and Nisha are likely to get Gujarat cadre, as they had opted.
The ACC approved that in cases where either of the officers cannot opt for the cadre State of the spouse in case it was also his or her home State, they can be allotted the immediate next cadre they had opted.
A candidate has to give his or her order of preference of a desired cadre before appearing for main examination.