NEW DELHI: The government on Tuesday announced service allocation for candidates who had cleared Civil Services Examination (CSE) 2017, putting off implementation of its proposal to link service/cadre allocation to their performance in the 15-week foundation course from the current year.

Service allocation list was put out by the department of personnel and training (DoPT) for a total 848 selected candidates.

TOI was the first to report on June 29 that the government had decided not to make scores in the foundation course at Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, count in service/cadre allocation for candidates of the 2017 batch.

According to sources in DoPT, there is no unanimity yet among the cadre-controlling ministries of various services including IAS, IPS and IFS on the proposal, prompting the government to put it on the back-burner. The successful candidates have therefore been allotted service and cadre as per existing criteria like their rank in CSE, order of preference for service, candidate’s category, availability of vacancy in the candidate’s category and findings of the medical board/appellate board with respect to the candidate.

The foundation course, which carries 400 marks, will only count for deciding seniority of the probationer within the batch.

DoPT had last month sought the comments of various cadre-controlling ministries, stating that the Prime Minister’s Office “has desired (them) to consider the suggestion and necessary action on it for its implementation from the current year itself”. The letter requested the ministries concerned to examine “if service allocation/cadre allocation to probationers selected on the basis of CSE be made after foundation course....based on the combined score obtained in the Civil Services Examination and the Foundation Course.”

The proposal to tweak service allocation norms had run into stiff political opposition, with the Congress and Left parties slamming it as a government ploy to infiltrate candidates of their preference in the Civil Services. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had in a tweet exhorted IAS/IPS aspirants to rise up against the move, warning that their future was at its risk. “RSS wants what’s rightfully yours. The letter below reveals the PM’s plan to appoint officers of RSS’s choice into the Central Services, by manipulating the merit list using subjective criteria, instead of exam rankings,” he said while tweeting a copy of the DoPT letter seeking comments of various ministries.

While the letter asked the respondents to revert expeditiously within a week, sources indicated there is no consensus so far on proposed changes. “So the service/cadre allocation for the current year will be done before the commencement of the foundation course, scheduled to conducted between August 27 and December 7, 2018,” said a DoPT functionary.

When asked if the proposal, first mooted by the D S Kothari committee in the Seventies, would be shelved altogether, the functionary said the decision not to implement it would only be for the current year. “The suggestion per se is good as there has been a tendency among some probationers not to take foundation course seriously. But then its implementation would require the entire Civil Services Exam procedure to be overhauled, which must involve UPSC that conducts the selection. Hence unanimity among the stakeholders is a prerequisite to operationalize the proposal to give weightage to the foundation course in service/cadre allocation,” he explained.

