NEW DELHI: IAS and IPS officers may lose their job if they overstay on foreign assignments for more than a month without permission, as per the new rules being finalised by the government.
The move comes after it came to the notice that some bureaucrats were not reporting back to India after completion of their foreign postings. Few of them were also proceeding on unauthorised leave soon after completing their tenure abroad. If an officer of all India service--Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Forest Service (IFoS), remains unauthorisedly absent after the sanctioned period of leave, study leave or tenure of foreign assignment, there shall be a one month waiting period, as per the draft rules.
After that, the state government concerned under whose cadre the officer hails from, shall issue a show cause notice, thereby giving him an opportunity to explain his case. Thereafter, if the officer does not return to duty, the state government concerned shall initiate proceedings of deemed resignation and forward a proposal to the Centre for effecting it within next two months, it said.
In case the state government fails to comply with these instructions, the central government shall initiate proceedings of deemed resignation on its own, the draft rules formed by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) said. As per existing rules, no officer of the three all India services shall be granted leave of any kind for a continuous period exceeding five years.
Also, an officer shall be deemed to have resigned from service if he is absent without authorisation for a period exceeding one year from the date of expiry of sanctioned leave or continues on foreign assignment beyond the period approved by the central government.
The DoPT has sent the new draft rules for comments to chief secretaries of state governments and union territories. There are 10 IAS officers who are at present on unauthorised leave and necessary action is being taken against them, a senior DoPT official said.
Last month, senior IAS officer Shishir Priyadarshi has deemed to have resigned from the service for being on unauthorised leave for over nine years. Priyadarshi, a 1980-batch IAS officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre, is deemed to have resigned from the IAS with effect from June 1, 2006, an order issued by the DoPT on August 28 had said.
In April this year, another IAS officer Prashant was deemed to have resigned from service. He was on August 18, 2009 appointed as Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in Washington.
The action came after Prashant failed to return after completion of his tenure in 2010.