Paper II

Story hook

On the morning of 28 May 2021, a video conference was held at Kalaikunda air base in West Bengal to review the damage from Cyclone Yaas. The Prime Minister was present. So was the Governor. The Chief Minister and her Chief Secretary arrived, handed over a report, and left for another district. Later the same day the Union Department of Personnel and Training issued an order requiring the Chief Secretary of West Bengal, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, to report to North Block in Delhi within three days.

He did not. On 31 May 2021 he retired from the Indian Administrative Service and was appointed, that afternoon, Chief Adviser to the Chief Minister of West Bengal.

Strip away the politics and what is left is the oldest structural fact about Indian state administration. The most powerful civil servant in a state is appointed by the Chief Minister, works at the Chief Minister's pleasure, and holds the state's entire machinery together — and he belongs to a service created by Article 312 of a Constitution that puts his cadre under a Union ministry, which can recall him under Rule 6(1) of the Indian Administrative Service (Cadre) Rules, 1954. Two masters, one chair. For seventy years this was a theoretical tension that never had to be resolved because nobody forced it. In three days in May 2021 it was forced, and the resolution was a resignation.

Two hundred and forty kilometres away, in any district of that same state, a younger officer from the same service was chairing the District Disaster Management Authority under Section 25 of the Disaster Management Act, 2005, signing prohibitory orders as District Magistrate, collecting land revenue as Collector, and sitting as member-secretary of a District Planning Committee constituted under Article 243ZD — a committee whose whole constitutional purpose is to hand district planning to elected panchayats and away from officers exactly like him. Also two masters. Also one chair. The office he occupies was invented in 1772 by a Company servant looking for a way to collect land revenue in Bengal, and it has never been abolished, in any state, by any government, of any party.

This unit is about those two chairs.

Why this matters for UPSC

This unit sits in Paper II, Section A, and it uniquely covers two items of the official syllabus at once — item 6, "State Government and Administration … Governor; Chief Minister; Council of Ministers; Chief Secretary; State Secretariat; Directorates", and item 7, "District Administration since Independence: Changing role of the Collector … imperatives of development management and law and order administration; district administration and democratic decentralisation" — which makes it one of the two or three highest- yielding areas in the whole of Paper II. Something from it appears in essentially every paper: usually a 10-mark short note (Board of Revenue, Divisional Commissioner, District Planning Committee) plus at least one 15- or 20-mark analytical question, most often on the changing role of the Collector or on the Secretariat-Directorate relationship. The questions are almost never factual — the examiner assumes you know that the Chief Secretary chairs the State Executive Committee and asks instead whether the office can survive without a fixed tenure.