Telangana IPS lobby agog over how UPSC interprets “residual service of six months” rule for DGP panel

After the Supreme Court’s four-week deadline given to the Union Public Service Commission to complete its empanelment process for the appointment of a regular DGP for Telangana, IPS officers in the state are agog with excitement as to how the UPSC determines the eligibility of the three top IPS officers for the DGP post.

What has come to create complication in the minds of IPS officers in the state is one key rule: that the officer should have residual service of at least six months from the date of occurrence of vacancy.

Now the problem is Anurag Sharma, who was the last regular DGP appointed through a UPSC panel, retired in November 2017. But the state govt sent a list of IPS officers to the UPSC for empanelment only in April 2025. It resulted in the UPSC returning the list sent in April and doing the same again with the second list sent in December.

Officers in the state are keeping their fingers crossed as to how the UPSC interprets the “residual service of six months” rule.

If the commission counts former in-charge DGP Jitender’s superannuation at the end of September 2025 as the date of vacancy, B Shivadhar Reddy (IPS:1994:TG) would be eligible for empanelment, as he had more than six months of service remaining at that time. If the December list is taken into consideration, Reddy will be out of the list.

The senior-most officer on the list was 1991-batch officer CV Anand, who had two years and four months of service remaining. Second in seniority was 1994-batch officer Vinayak Prabhakar Apte, with three years and eight months of service left, while the third on the list was his batchmate B Shivadhar Reddy, who had only about three months of service remaining until April 2026. Other DGP-rank officers included 1994-batch officers Soumya Mishra and Shikha Goel.

As per the Supreme Court directions in the Prakash Singh case, the new chief of state police will have a minimum of two years’ tenure, irrespective of his or her date of superannuation. In this way, the confusion persists until the UPSC sends its panel.