A report by the parliamentary standing committee on personnel, public grievances, law & justice has revealed that the vacancies at higher levels of bureaucracy have reached "alarming levels".
According to Times of India, the panel’s report submitted in Parliament on Wednesday underlined the perennial shortage of IAS officers since 1951 and added that vacancy position has increased to an alarming level at present.
It further added that presently there are only 4,926 IAS officers against a sanctioned strength of 6,396 as per the civil list dated January 1, 2016.
The report pitched for increasing efforts to fill up the vacancies, either by utilising the additional capacity at the Mussoorie-based Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) to train more IAS officers or increasing the training capacity.
The parliamentary panel was told that out of 1,470 officer vacancies for IAS , about 900 vacancies are from the direct recruitment quota and the rest from states' promotion quota.
According to the report, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) informed the parliamentary panel that one of the main reasons behind the shortfall in direct recruitment was the late cadre review, which was done very recently to increase the number of posts.
The DoPT also pointed out that recruitment has been abnormally low for last 10 years. It also stated that the direct recruitment could not be stepped up all of a sudden as the training capacity for IAS officers was only 180 per year.
