A Parliamentary Committee has flagged an acute shortage of IAS officers at the national level. According to its report submitted to the Parliament, the country is currently facing a nearly 19% shortage of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, with at least 1,300 of the 6,877 sanctioned positions remaining vacant.
The grim scenario of a shortage of IAS officers was revealed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee in its 160th report on Demands for Grants (2026-27) pertaining to DoPT, tabled in the Rajya Sabha on Monday.
According to it, Nagaland is facing the worst shortage at 43.62 percent, followed by Kerala (32.03 percent) and Manipur (30.43 per cent). It is closely followed by Tripura (27.45 percent) and Odisha (25.40 percent).
The AGMUT cadre (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, and Union Territories), which has officers across different states and UTs, has a shortage of 25.09%. Sikkim too, with 25.00%, is operating with one-fourth of its sanctioned strength vacant.
The Committee said that a special strategy is needed for the northeastern states and smaller cadres where the shortage is disproportionately high.
While the national average shortage is 18.90 percent, several cadres are functioning well above this level.
The panel said that West Bengal (19.84 percent), Rajasthan (19.28 percent), Haryana (20 percent), and Jharkhand (20.98 percent) are functioning with nearly one-fifth of their sanctioned strength vacant.
The panel says that no cadre is currently operating at full sanctioned strength, indicating that the issue of shortage is systemic rather than isolated.
The panel is of the view that persistent shortage continues to adversely affect administrative capacity at the Centre and in the states, particularly at the field-level positions where timely decision-making and policy implementation are critical. Keeping it in mind, it has urged the government to fill up the vacancies on a priority basis.
Additionally, the panel in another part of the report recommended that the government develop a comprehensive framework to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) in public administration.
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