BENGALURU: The state this year saw resignations of two class one officers of the Karnataka cadre — IPS officer K Annamalai and IAS officer S Sasikanth Senthil. Their resignations are yet to be accepted.
Annamalai, a 2011 batch officer, resigned on May 28 quoting personal reasons. His resignation letter was approved and signed by the then CM H D Kumaraswamy and is now pending before the Ministry of Home Affairs. Senthil’s resignation on September 6 is pending before the state government after a case of alleged corruption surfaced against him during his tenure as Dakshina Kannada deputy commissioner. He had put in his papers soon after Article 370 was abrogated. “The Constitutional values are being diluted,” Senthil, a 2009 bacth officer, had stated after resigning.
Apart from the duo, two IAS officers have put in their papers. Kashish Mittal of the 2011 batch and Kannan Gopinathan of the 2012 batch, both from the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory- cadre, resigned. TNIE spoke to some former bureaucrats who said that the resignation of young bureaucrats within the first decade of their career is a sign that “all’s not well with the civil services. “There is a need of immediate intervention by the government to set things right,” said the former Karnataka DG&IGP and vigilance commissioner R Srikumar.
Former IAS officer S M Jamdar attributed the recent resignations of young officers to the “deteriorating” working environment in the All India Civil Services. “Bureaucrats are forced to implement diktats of politicians. Else, they are branded and isolated. There’s also little support from their own colleagues. Earlier, there was a lot of prestige and pride attached to the civil services. These services are now attracting wrong kind of candidates, who curry political favours to climb the ladder,” he said.
He criticised the present format of the civil services exams and said that the entry level has been raised to 32 years for general merit candidates, who are given six attempts to qualify. The age limit is much higher for other category candidates with unlimited number of attempts. “The Britishers had kept 21 as the age of entry in single attempt, when they had introduced the Indian Civil Services. Mid-thirties is too late to start a service oriented career,” added the former bureaucrat.
“There’s a lot of gap between the aspirations of the young officers when they join and the reality, which confronts them. Young officers, especially those who are service-oriented, are among the ones who are getting frustrated. There is unwanted and uncalled for pressure on officers. The resignation of such dynamic officers is also a loss to the government which spends time and funds on each officer towards capacity building,” said Srikumar.Former chief secretary Kaushik Mukherjee had a different view on the matter. “There are some expectations from an officer when he joins the civil services. He has to work within a structure,” said Mukherjee.