The Union government has proposed an amendment to the IAS (Cadre) Rules, which would enable it to post IAS officers on Central deputation without consulting state governments. In effect, by this single amendment, the nature of All India Services (AIS) would be altered, making them, in essence, Central services.
The founding fathers of the Constitution understood that while India as a political entity had been created, the centripetal forces at work could rip the nascent nation apart. An amalgam of princely states and erstwhile British provinces, with different languages, food habits, cultural mores, etc, it would be impossible for the Centre to hold the nation together. Therefore, they created one instrument of integration, which was born out of a deep understanding of the country’s diversity and of the difficulty of forging unity in such diversity. In a federal structure, in which the states had full autonomy to make laws and administer these within the jurisdiction carved out for them under the states’ list, it followed that the services needed for administration would be constituted under the state laws. The Centre would likewise create services to administer what fell within their jurisdiction.