Centre Makes Major Changes To Cadre Allocation Policy For All India Service Officers

In the recently issued policy order by the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT), ministries concerned will determine the vacancies for the officers belonging to IAS, IPS and IFoS on the basis of “cadre gap” as on January 1, every year.

Abolishing the five zones system for allocation of cadres, the DoPT has now introduced new groupings in which “all the state cadres/joint cadres have been arranged in alphabetical order and divided into four groups” only.

State-Wise Groupings

Group-I has AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory), Andhra Pradesh, Assam-Meghalaya, Bihar and Chhattisgarh.

Group-II includes Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh.

Group-III comprises Maharashtra, Manipur, Nagaland, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim and Tamil Nadu.

Group-IV has Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

The cadre-controlling authorities, namely, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) / Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) / Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEF&CC) shall determine the vacancies, including the break-up into unreserved (UR), Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), Other Backward Classes (OBC), Insider and Outsider vacancies for each of the cadres.

It further said that the cadre-wise/category-wise vacancies would be determined on the basis of the “cadre gap as on 1st January of the year following the examination year”.

Category-Wise Vacancies

Every year, the state governments shall indicate the total number of vacancies to be filled through a particular civil services examination latest by January 31 of the year following the year of examination, the DoPT order said.

In respect to the services under them, the respective cadre-controlling authorities shall also determine the vacancies including the break-up into different categories (UR/SC/ST/OBC) “keeping in mind the cadre gap in the cadre, the requisitions received from the state governments and the position of the rosters in the cadre”, it said, adding that the vacancies reserved for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) category for recruitment, shall be considered a part of the UR vacancies only.

“The vacancies so determined would be communicated to the state governments and published on the respective ministry’s website and both the actions may preferably be completed before the announcement of the final result of the civil services examination/IFoS examination on the basis of which the recruitment is to be made,” the DoPT order read.

Since this would be a time-bound exercise, the requisition received from the state governments after the deadline, as prescribed by the central government, would not be considered while determining the vacancies, it further noted.

Insider, Outsider Allocation

Giving details on allocation against insider vacancies (candidates opting for their home state), it said that cadres will be given on the basis of a “cycle-based” slotting system. “For allocation to home cadre against an insider vacancy, a candidate will be required to express his/her willingness to be allocated to his/her home state/cadre, otherwise he/she shall not be considered for his/her home cadre at all,” it noted.

The allocation against the “Outsider vacancies” (vacancies earmarked for candidates outside their home state) will be done according to the roster system after placing ‘insiders’ at their proper places on the allocation chart and will be done in two stages including first for PwBD (persons with benchmark disabilities) candidates and second for other than PwBD candidates, it said.

“This cadre allocation policy issued in supersession of the existing cadre allocation policy and comes into effect with the Civil Services Examination-2026 and Indian Forest Service Examination-2026,” the DoPT said.