The Thin Years: Who Will Be in the Field? Reading the Civil List, Part 2

Part 1 was about who is retiring. This part is about who is left to do the work.

Most of the department’s assessment, verification and first-level enforcement at the IRS level is done by Assistant and Deputy Commissioners. It is the field grade. How many officers it holds in any year depends on two things that were decided long ago: how many direct recruits each Civil Services Examination sent us, and how many promotees are still short of 60.

Those are two separate doors. Direct recruits come through the examination, against the direct-recruitment vacancies the department reports to UPSC each year. Promotees come from the Income Tax Officers’ cadre, against the promotion quota, through DPCs. Each has its own roster and its own vacancies. A shortfall on one side is not made up by the other, so each has to be read on its own.

The direct-recruit batches are not the same size

Direct recruits move out of the field grade at fairly regular points in their service. A batch becomes Deputy Commissioner on 1 January after four completed years and Joint Commissioner after nine. So the field grade at any time is roughly the last nine batches, plus the promotees.

Here are the last dozen direct-recruit batches, by exam year:

For batches up to 2023, the counts are officers serving on 1 July 2024, from the civil list. CSE 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024 are cross-checked against DoPT’s service-allocation lists. CSE 2023 and 2025 are vacancy figures reported by coaching sites; I could not find the allocation lists to confirm them.

Five years of large batches, then four years of small ones at about a third the size, then large again. The four exams from CSE 2018 to CSE 2021 sent 216 officers between them, fewer than the two exams before them, CSE 2016 and CSE 2017, sent together (309).

What that does to the field

I ran the cadre forward from the civil list, month by month, with the same rules as the career outlook tool: retirement at 60, promotion to Joint Commissioner after nine years of service, and the batches above. I added 100 promotees a year (the average of the last five years), each promoted at 54, and kept the posts from Commissioner upwards at their present number.

Officers in the field grade (ACIT and DCIT) on 1 July of each year. The newest direct-recruit batch, still in training, is left out:

The 2024 figure, 1,916, is close to the working strength the civil list itself reports for the grade (1,949). The sanctioned strength is 2,294.

By 2027 the field grade is about a quarter smaller than in 2024, and at 64% of its sanctioned strength. It recovers only from 2029, as the large batches of CSE 2022 to 2025 finish their probation and settle in.

The two doors produce the fall in different ways:

• On the promotee side, the problem is numbers. More than half the field grade in 2024 was promotees, and more than half of those were 55 or older. Between July 2024 and July 2027, about 800 promotees leave the grade, by retiring or by moving up to Joint Commissioner. At 100 promotions a year, the promotee strength in the grade falls from 1,109 to about 600 and stays there. To hold it at the 2024 level, the promotion roster would have to fill about 265 places a year until 2027, two and a half times the recent average.
• On the direct-recruit side, the problem is experience. The number of direct recruits in the field hardly changes: 807 in 2024, about 850 in 2027. The large batches that joined in 2015 to 2018 (CSE 2014 to 2017) leave for Joint Commissioner between January 2025 and January 2028, and the larger batches from CSE 2022 onwards replace them. The replacements are not fewer, but they are new. In 2024, direct-recruit DCITs, with four or more years of service, made up about a third of the field grade, and direct-recruit ACITs a fourteenth. In 2027 the two are the other way round: 330 DCITs and 517 ACITs in their first four years.

How deep the trough is depends mostly on promotions. With 150 promotees a year, the field grade bottoms out at about 1,610 in 2027. With 60 a year, it falls to about 1,320 in 2028. The size of future exam batches matters only from 2029, because a batch spends its first year in training.

The small batches travel upward

The four small batches do not stay in the field. They become due for Joint Commissioner between January 2029 and January 2032, and the number of officers due each January falls with them:

If every one of them were promoted on time, the Additional and Joint Commissioner grade would swell to about 1,750 in 2027, above both its working strength (1,267) and its sanctioned strength (1,675), and then shrink back to about 1,350 by 2032, close to its size in 2024 (1,417). The grade itself does not run short. What runs short is the flow into it, and that matters one step further up: from the mid-2030s, the same four batches will be the officers eligible for Commissioner, and there will be few of them.

Ad-hoc promotions, and a chance to catch up

In practice, promotions in the IRS do not always arrive on time, or in their final form. Two terms explain why.

An ad-hoc promotion is a stop-gap. When a post is vacant but the regular promotion process cannot yet be completed (because a seniority list is not final, a case is pending in court, or the DPC has not met), the officer is promoted to fill the post for the time being. Under the DoPT’s instructions of 30 March 1988, an ad-hoc promotion gives no right to continue in the post, to seniority in the grade or to regular promotion. It is granted for a fixed term and extended, a few months at a time.

Regularisation is the regular promotion that follows: the Departmental Promotion Committee assesses the officers, and they are appointed to the grade under the rules. As a rule, only regular service counts as qualifying service for the next promotion.

Both are common in the department. CBDT Office Order 188 of 2020, for example, extended the ad-hoc appointments of 167 officers of the 2009 batch as Joint Commissioner to the end of 2020. Their ad-hoc appointments went back to an order of 31 December 2018, two years earlier. Promotees have waited longer. Officers promoted from ITO to ACIT against the vacancies of 2014–15 and 2015–16 were given ad-hoc promotions in 2016. The regular DPCs could not be held until the all-India seniority list of ITOs was redrawn after the Supreme Court’s 2012 judgment in N.R. Parmar, so they were regularised only in May 2019 and December 2020. According to the Income Tax Gazetted Officers’ Association, this affected about 700 officers, who had worked as Assistant Commissioners for three to four and a half years before their regular promotion. Because their qualifying service was counted from regularisation, they then waited for Deputy Commissioner while direct recruits of a later batch went ahead of them.

This is where the batch sizes help. Between 2025 and 2028, more than a thousand officers become due for Joint Commissioner, and if they were all promoted, the grade would hold more officers than it has sanctioned posts. That is when ad-hoc arrangements and slow regularisations are most likely. From 2029 to 2032, fewer than 80 officers a year become due, and the grade falls further below its sanctioned strength each year: about 75 posts to spare in 2029, about 320 by 2032. With vacancies to spare, the DPCs can be held on time, the ad-hoc appointments of the crowded years can be regularised, and the next batches can be promoted regularly from the start. Whether that happens depends on the DPCs and the seniority lists, not on numbers. But the numbers will, for once, be on the side of the officers.

What it means

The field will be at its thinnest between 2026 and 2028, at roughly a quarter below 2024 and a third below the sanctioned strength. Of the officers still there, more will be new to the job than at any time in the last decade.

The shortfall in numbers is on the promotee side, and only the promotion roster can fill it. Direct-recruit vacancies are reported to UPSC against the direct-recruitment share, so a larger examination intake does not replace retiring promotees, and the direct-recruit side is already growing again. Promotion is also the lever that works soonest. A new direct recruit takes a year to reach the field and four more to become a Deputy Commissioner. A promotee arrives with twenty years in the department. The difference between 60 and 150 promotions a year is about 360 officers in the field grade by 2028.

The hole made by the direct-recruit vacancies of CSE 2018 to 2021 will move up the service for twenty years. It is in the field now, at Joint Commissioner from 2029, and in the queue for Commissioner in the second half of the 2030s. Each grade it passes through will feel it.

The lull is a chance to clear the backlog. The four lean years at Joint Commissioner, 2029 to 2032, are the years in which vacancies in the grade will most comfortably exceed the officers due for it. Regularising pending ad-hoc promotions and settling seniority in those years would cost no one a post.

Not every sanctioned post needs filling the old way. Faceless assessment, centralised processing and better data have changed how many officers a given workload needs. A field grade at 64% of its sanctioned strength may be a crisis, or the sanctioned strength may be out of date. The answer matters before deciding how many officers to recruit.

What could change

• Hold promotee DPCs on a fixed calendar, and fill the promotion quota every year. Of all the levers, this one acts within months and brings experienced officers. Holding the promotee strength steady would take about 265 promotions a year until 2027.
• Report direct-recruitment vacancies steadily. The batches of 50 that followed batches of 150 came from the vacancies reported for those years. Batches that swing like this leave a service short of officers in one decade and stuck in promotion queues in the next. A requisition planned several years ahead from the direct-recruitment roster, rather than one year at a time, would avoid a hole that then travels up the service for twenty years.
• Post for the trough. For 2026 to 2028, field formations could be given priority over directorates and deputation when posting Deputy Commissioners, and new Assistant Commissioners could be paired with experienced officers for their first assessment season.
• Use 2029 to 2032 to regularise. Hold the regular DPCs for Joint Commissioner on time in those years, regularise every pending ad-hoc promotion and finalise the seniority lists, so that the next large batches, from CSE 2022 onwards, are promoted regularly from the start.
• Review the sanctioned strength against the work. Before filling every post, work out how many officers the faceless and centralised systems actually need, and set the sanctioned strength from that.

About the data

Sources. The Civil List 2024 of the Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax), as on 1 July 2024. For exam intake: DoPT’s service-allocation lists for CSE 2020, 2021, 2022 (first iterations) and 2024. The official DoPT site would not open from outside India, so these are copies hosted by coaching sites, checked against the civil list, which matches them: CSE 2020 sent 67 officers in the first iteration and 57 were serving in 2024; CSE 2021 and 2022 sent 175 together and 175 were serving. For CSE 2023 (186) and CSE 2025 (150) I have used reported vacancy figures, not allocation lists.

On ad-hoc promotion and regularisation: CBDT Office Order No. 188 of 2020 (F. No. A-32012/3/2018-Ad.VI, 7 October 2020), which cites DoPT OM No. 28036/8/87-Estt.(D) of 30 March 1988; and the Income Tax Gazetted Officers’ Association’s letter to the Chairman, CBDT, of 8 February 2021 (F. No. ITGOA/CHQ/STS/2020-22/01) on the 2014–15 and 2015–16 promotee batches.

Assumptions.

• An exam year’s batch joins in the second half of the following year and spends about a year in training before reaching the field.
• Every officer is promoted on the date they become due. In practice some promotions are ad hoc or late, which would keep officers in the field grade longer and the Joint Commissioner grade smaller than shown in the crowded years.
• Promotion to Deputy Commissioner falls on 1 January after four completed years. Promotion to Joint Commissioner falls on 1 January after nine completed years, counted from the end of the batch year. Both apply to direct recruits and promotees alike. In practice each promotion comes through a DPC, and a delay keeps a batch longer in the field grade.
• Retirement is on the last day of the month in which an officer turns 60.
• From CSE 2026 onwards, 150 direct recruits a year. This changes nothing before 2029.
• Direct recruits and promotees are filled through separate rosters. The exam figures above are direct-recruitment intake only. Promotee intake is an assumption: 100 a year (the average of the last five years), each promoted at 54, from 2025. I also show 60 and 150.
• Posts from Commissioner upwards stay at their 1 July 2024 numbers.
• Nobody resigns, takes voluntary retirement, dies in service or goes on deputation. Every one of these would make the field thinner than shown. Voluntary retirement alone has been 53 to 58 officers a year since 2021 (Part 1).

Limits.

• Income Tax Officers, who do much of the field work below the IRS, are not in the civil list and are not counted here.
• The sanctioned strength of the grade includes posts outside the field, in directorates and at headquarters.
• The projection shows the shape of what is coming, not exact numbers for any one year.

Next: how old are we when we join, and has that changed?