Bored with bureaucracy?

IAS loses out to sunnier corporate life, tourism topshot latest to opt out.

Updated on: Jun 21, 2006, 12:04:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After virtually being a career magnet, the awe-inspiring Indian Administrative Service (IAS) could be falling to the law of diminishing returns.

IAS officials are now quitting the drab sarkari environs for a smart corporate life. The latest to join the list is high-profile additional secretary in the tourism ministry, Rajiv Talwar.

Talwar, a UT cadre official of the 1978 batch, will join realty major DLF in Delhi and is expected to head the company's hospitality division.

Before joining the Centre about two years ago, Talwar had served various posts in the Delhi government, including principal secretary, transport, and managing director of Delhi Tourism and Transport Development Corporation.

Talwar confirmed the move to resign to join DLF to the HT.

“I will be able to answer your detailed queries later,” he said, when asked about whether he has already resigned or not.

Talwar will have in company a former senior colleague from the UT cadre: S.P. Aggarwal, who retired last year.

Not willing to take an assignment from Delhi government, the former municipal commission opted for the corporate world.

Money and quick career growths are some of the incentives. Red-tape in the Indian bureaucracy makes the service professionally unattractive, sources said. Most bureaucrats who have joined the corporate sector get to two to three times their salary in the private sector.

Talwar says it is not than just money. “Jobs in the private sector is as challenging as in the government. It’s no more like earlier days when challenging jobs were only in the government sector,” he said.

Many in the civil service may not agree but 23 top and middle level officials in the Maharashtra government called it quits. They have joined Mukesh Ambani’s Rs 10,000 crore mega SEZ project in the last one year.

They include A. Rama Krishnan, principal secretary food and civil supply, Vasant Raut, former officer on special duty to CM Vilasrao Deshmukh and Bhujangrao Mohte, former commissioner of Crime Branch.

Samba Shiv Rao, an Andhra Pradesh cadre IAS official, resigned to join a company in his home state.

Sanjay Gupta, an IAS officer of Gujarat cadre, quit to join as CEO of Infrastructure, Adani Group last year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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