Revival of Sub Collector posting enthuses rookies

Telangana’s latest move to revert to the previous process of training young IAS officers seems to have enthused the latest crop of rookies in the state. The Revanth Reddy-led government has recently posted certain 2022 batch IAS officers as Sub Collectors. In February 2020, ostensibly as part of administrative reforms, the then K Chandrasekhar Rao government had abolished Joint Collector posts in the district collectorates and introduced Additional Collector posts. Thereafter, each district came to have a Collector and two Additional Collectors. Of the two Additional Collectors, one was specially deployed to govern the local bodies. The idea was to ensure that the Additional Collectors as ‘specialists’ will play a key role in the functioning of local bodies. Thus, the previous government had made a rather controversial decision to halt the posting of fresh IAS entrants as Sub Collectors. Grapevine has it that the last batch to hold such positions was in 2015. Apparently, the reasoning was that officers posted to state-level offices, upon being assigned to sub-divisions as Revenue Divisional Officers, were seen as pliable and easier to manage. For nearly a decade, Telangana had stood out as an exception across the country with no Sub Collectors in place -only IAS officers designated as such were posted to these subdivisions. This move had raised eyebrows among many, especially since the experience of serving as a Sub Collector is considered essential for budding IAS officers to grasp the fundamentals of revenue administration. Now, the Congress government has decided to revive this system. A retired bureaucrat, who could not resist sharing his two cents, called it a ‘welcome step’ and emphasized that this experience is crucial for new IAS entrants to truly learn the ropes at the field level. The reversal of a system touted as ‘part of reforms’ has now raised questions of what else is in store on the administrative front.