New Delhi: Union Minister Jitendra Singh on Friday said merger of the Jammu and Kashmir cadre of IAS and IPS officers into the AGMUT cadre would further the process of total integration of the Union Territory with the rest of the country.
The Jammu and Kashmir cadre of Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Forest Service (IFoS) officers was on Thursday merged with the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories) cadre.
The officers of these three services are allotted cadre, which is either a state or state and union territories.
“After the creation of the Union Territory following the abrogation of Article 370, the merger of J&K cadre into AGMUT cadre was a natural corollary and would further carry forward the process of total integration of J&K with the mainstream India,” he said.
Singh, the Minister of State (MoS) for Personnel, said UT cadre offers Jammu & Kashmir wider range of officers to choose from because there is going to be a much larger pool of all-India service officers, including IAS officers, for posting in the two newly created Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.
He said J&K will now be getting its officers from the common cadre available for the three states of Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram as well as all the Union Territories of India.
As a result of this, the officers from J&K can now be moved seamlessly in and out of J&K among the different Union Territories of India as well as the three states of Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and Mizoram, said Singh.
“Such an arrangement often tends to bring in more accountability in the conduct and performance of officers,” he added.
Singh said the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has also done away with the UPA-regime order whereby J&K used to have directly appointed IAS officers vis-a-vis IAS officers inducted from the erstwhile state’s Kashmir Administrative Service (KAS) in the ratio of 50:50.
This distribution of officers was in contrast to the ratio of around 67:33 maintained in other state/UT cadres of the country whereby 67 percent IAS officers are the ones who have been directly selected into the service through all-India civil services exam and 33 percent from the state civil services, he said.
“As a result of this earlier arrangement, the number of directly inducted IAS officers was much lower in Jammu & Kashmir whereas a large number of IAS officers were those who had been inducted into IAS from the state KAS services,” the minister said.
Now, with the introduction of the same ratio in J&K as is prevalent elsewhere, this will stand corrected to a large extent and the composition of IAS services in J&K will be the same as elsewhere, he added.
