What We Learn After Joining: Reading the Civil List, Part 5

Part 3 showed what we bring when we join: mostly engineering degrees, and very little law or accounting. This part is about what we add afterwards.

The civil list prints each officer’s qualifications, as the officer reported them. It does not say when each degree was earned. So “learned after joining” is an inference, and it rests on two things. The first is comparing officers at different stages of their careers, with the newest batches, the 76th and 77th, as the “before service” baseline. The second is the engineers and doctors, who rarely hold a law or management degree before they join; when they list one, they almost certainly earned it in service.

One in three adds a degree

The table shows the share of officers who list at least one added qualification: law, management, a business-law master’s, public policy, a PhD or M.Phil, or a professional qualification such as CA. The last column repeats the count for officers whose first degree is in engineering or medicine, who rarely hold a law or management degree before joining.

The longer the service, the more of us have studied further. Almost none of the engineers and doctors arrive with a law or management degree; nearly half of the longest-serving ones have one.

What we study: law, above all

Share of direct recruits holding each qualification:

Law is the degree we go back for. A quarter of the most senior direct recruits hold one, against 2% of those just joined. For a service whose orders are argued before tribunals and courts, that is the clearest sign in the data of officers filling a gap on their own. It is also the clearest sign that the department ought to encourage the study of law proactively, through study leave and sponsored programmes, rather than leave it to each officer’s initiative. Management comes second. The M.Phil is probably the exception: most were likely earned before joining, often while preparing for the examination.

Who goes back for what depends on what we came with. Among direct recruits who joined before 2020:

Commerce graduates go furthest into law and management, building on what they already know. Arts and science graduates are the most likely to hold a PhD.

The business-law master’s

Every IRS officer trainee at NADT now receives a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Law along with the induction training, through NADT’s tie-up with NALSAR, Hyderabad, and later with the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Officers can then go on to a master’s in business law, listed variously as MTBL, MBL or a Master’s in Taxation and Business Laws, on their own initiative.

Few officers list the diploma: only seven do. But 104 list the master’s. Since nearly every direct recruit of these years holds the diploma, the share of each batch that went on to the master’s is, in effect, the rate at which officers converted the diploma into a degree:

For the batches that joined between 2004 and 2013, about one officer in eleven went on to the master’s, and in the 2009 to 2011 batches about one in seven, on their own initiative and alongside their first postings. That is the plainest evidence in the civil list that when a path into law exists, officers take it.

For the batches since 2014, almost no one lists the master’s. Some may still take it, and some may not have reported it. But the drop between the 2013 batch (6 officers) and the 2014 batch (none) is too sharp to be only a matter of time, and why the later batches have not taken it up needs to be looked into. In my own case, I found the process far from easy, and too much of it depended on my own initiative, which, once I was in the field, I could not find the time or energy to sustain. I suspect I am not alone.

Mid-career, at IIM and abroad

A smaller group studied mid-career, on study leave or as part of the mandatory Mid-Career Training Programmes (MCTP), conducted by the department or sponsored by the DoPT. About sixteen officers list IIM Bangalore’s Post Graduate Programme in Public Policy and Management. A handful studied abroad: Harvard Kennedy School (a mid-career MPA, one alongside its International Tax Program), Oxford (an M.Sc in Taxation, alongside an advanced master’s in international taxation from Lausanne), Duke, the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, the National University of Singapore, and a Fulbright fellowship.

Almost all of them are from batches that joined before 2006. The batches of 2005 to 2014 are now ten to twenty years into service, the age at which officers usually go, and only a few of them list such a degree.

The civil list does not say which of these degrees came through an MCTP or a sponsored programme and which the officer arranged on their own, so the details are not easy to tell from it.

Women and men

Among direct recruits who joined before 2020, women and men add qualifications at the same rate: 31.7% of the women and 30.9% of the men. The mix differs a little. Women list an M.Phil twice as often (8.5% against 4%), which probably reflects their first degrees in the humanities rather than study in service. Men list management degrees (8% against 6%), the business-law master’s (6% against 4%) and professional accounting qualifications (2.2% against 0.9%) slightly more often. Among those who joined before 2000, women took law more often than men: 28% against 21%.

Among promotees, 17% list an added qualification, mostly law (9%) and management (5%).

The most decorated batch

Counting every qualification each officer lists (school certificates aside), these are the direct-recruit batches with the most:

The 1992 batch has the highest share of officers with two or more added qualifications, and the most varied: among its 62 serving officers, 15 hold a management degree, 14 a law degree, 9 an M.Phil, 8 a public policy degree and 6 a PhD.

Older batches have had more time, so the fairer comparison is with neighbouring batches. Among the batches of the 2000s, 2005 stands out (41% with at least one added qualification, 13% with two or more), and 2010 matches it at 41%, helped by the business-law master’s.

Eight qualifications

Two officers list eight each.

Garikapaty Shanker Phani Kishore, Pr. CIT (1992 batch): B.Com, Chartered Accountant, Cost and Management Accountant, a master’s in technology management, IIM Bangalore’s PGPPM, LLB, LLM and a PhD in strategic management. The earlier posts listed in the civil list are with the Government of Andhra Pradesh, including Secretary for Information Technology, Electronics and Communications.

Capt. Pradeep Shoury Arya, CIT (2004 batch): BA, MA, MBA, the Master’s in Taxation and Business Laws, LLB, LLM, a PhD, and a commercial pilot’s licence, which explains the “Capt.” in the civil list.

What it means

Most of the service’s legal and tax learning happens on the officer’s own initiative. A quarter of the senior officers went back for a law degree. The service needs exactly that knowledge, and very few bring it (Part 3). But it is learned unevenly, by those who choose to, when they can.

When there is a path, officers take it. The diploma at NADT opened a route to a master’s in business law, and up to one officer in seven of a batch took it, at their own initiative. For the batches since 2014, the route seems to have narrowed or closed: almost none of them list the master’s.

Mid-career study beyond the mandatory MCTP is rarer for the batches now at mid-career. Every officer attends the Mid-Career Training Programmes. The degrees at IIM and abroad, which officers pursue beyond them, belong almost entirely to batches that joined before 2006. Whether the later batches have had fewer opportunities, or have taken fewer, the civil list cannot tell, but the gap is clear.

The civil list undercounts all of this. Qualifications are reported by officers and many have not updated them since joining. The real figures are higher.

What could change

• Encourage the study of law, actively. The business-law master’s shows how many officers will study law when a path exists, even on their own. Study leave and sponsorship for the master’s and for a full degree in law would turn that into a deliberate programme.
• Offer learning as a programme, open to every batch. A standing programme in tax law, international taxation, accounting and data analysis, offered to each batch rather than to a few, and linked to the postings that use it, would build expertise across the service instead of in pockets (Part 3 makes the same case from what we bring).
• Make mid-career study predictable. A clear, published policy on study leave and sponsorship for mid-career programmes, in India and abroad, with a fair chance for every batch, would let officers plan for it.
• Find out why the master’s stopped. Why almost no officer who joined after 2013 lists the master’s, and how it changed the work of those who took it, is worth knowing before designing what comes next.
• Keep the record current, and use it. Qualifications in the civil list could be kept up to date through service. Officers with advanced degrees in law, taxation and public policy could teach at NADT and the regional training institutes.

About the data

Source. The Civil List 2024 of the Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax), as on 1 July 2024: the qualifications printed for each officer. 297 officers (6.8%) have none printed and are left out.

Assumptions.

• Qualifications are free text, in about 1,470 different spellings. I sorted them into the kinds shown above; the sorting is my judgement and should be right to within a point or two.
• “Added” qualifications are the kinds that are rarely a first degree: law, management, a business-law master’s, public policy or administration, a PhD or M.Phil, an LLM, and professional qualifications (CA, CS, cost accountancy, CFA). The civil list does not date them, so “added after joining” is an inference, strongest for engineers and doctors.
• Counts of qualifications per officer leave out school certificates and include diplomas and professional qualifications. One officer’s commercial pilot’s licence is counted.
• Batches are by the year in the civil code. Batches with fewer than 20 serving officers are left out of the batch table.
• Women and men are estimated from first names, as described in Part 4.

Limits.

• Only officers serving on 1 July 2024 are in the list. The older batches are represented by those who joined youngest, and they have had the longest to study.
• Older batches also arrived with a different mix of first degrees, more of them in the humanities, so part of the difference between batches is what they started with.
• Qualifications are self-reported and not always updated. Every figure here is a floor.

This is the last of the posts. The full set of findings, with what each means for the service, will follow as a report.