16 Indian Forest Service officers empanelled as joint secretaries; Full List

THE government on Monday published a new empanelment list of 16 officers belonging to Indian Forest Service. All those IFS officers, belonging to 1989 batch, have been empanelled as union joint secretaries. Four of those officers belong to Madhya Pradesh cadre whereas three each are from Haryana and Himachal Pradesh cadre. Here is the full list:

1. MD Sinha (Haryana cadre)
2. ML Srivastava (Sikkim cadre)
3. Satya Prakas Yadav (UP cadre)
4. Vineet Kumar Garg (Haryana cadre)
5. Visharam Sagar Sharma (Madhya Pradesh cadre)
6. Prashant A Jadhav (Madhya Pradesh cadre)
7. Sudhanshu Gupta (Tamil Nadu cadre)
8. Aditya Kumar Joshi (Manipur-Tripura cadre)
9. Amitabh Gautam (Himachal Pradesh cadre)
10. Biswajit Kumar Singh (Jammu and Kashmir cadre)
11. Pankaj Goel (Haryana cadre)
12. Soumitra Das Gupta (West Bengal cadre)
13. KS Thakur (Himachal Pradesh cadre)
14. Monoj Bhaik (Himachal Pradesh cadre)
15. Alok Das (Madhya Pradesh cadre)
16. OM Praksh Choudhary (Madhya Pradesh cadre)
Significantly, all these officers are of 1989 batch whereas IAS officers of 1996 batch have been posted as joint secretaries. Indian Revenue Service officer Satya Prasanth who has written a series of poplar blogs  on the need to have pay parity among IAS and other services, argued in an article last year how there was only one Indian Forest Service officer (as on February 12, 2014) out of 128 officers of various services who had enjoyed the secretary’s pay, or the apex scale of Rs 80,000 (fixed) per month. Out of 128 mentioned there, as many as 95 belonged to Indian Administrative Service. In fact, one secretary level post occupied by an Indian Forest Service officer is that of director general of forests (equivalent to special secretary).
Prasanth wrote in another article (excerpts of which were also published by BoI) how the 6th Central Pay Commission justified a higher pay for IAS by citing their initial postings to small places, frequent transfers and intense pulls and pressures. “This justification in itself is highly self-contradictory. Initial postings of IPS and Indian Forest Service (IFS) officers are also to small places…Most often than not these Central Service officers work in highly inaccessible areas with deplorable and inhuman conditions, which is never the case with the IAS.”
The question that has however remained unanswered is whether the 7th Pay Commission would look into the grievances of Indian Forest Service and other such services who have been expecting a better deal this time round.