Retired bureaucrat and former Finance Secretary under the Government of India, Subhash Chandra Garg (IAS:1983:RJ), finds a wide gap between expectations and ground realities that IAS officers often confront after coming into the service. He was quite candid in confessing that many IAS officers enter the service without fully understanding the nature of the work involved.
Garg, who also served as Executive Director in the World Bank, said that before joining the service, young officers have lofty views about it as they don’t know what a collector is supposed to do on the ground.
Garg reflected on this gap while speaking on a podcast with entrepreneur Raj Shamani. After giving a life to the bureaucratic profession, Garg came out with his take on what civil service aspirants think of IAS careers and what future actually unfolds for them once they are in. He confessed that most aspirants carry only a superficial understanding of the service.
According to him, aspirants only think that they will become an SDM, then a Collector, and then a big officer, adding that many do not really know what a Collector actually does or what the real responsibilities of an IAS officer are.
The fact is, as Garg noted, that officers largely learn their roles only after joining the service, whether at the district level or later in the Secretariat.
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