The Forum urged the Prime Minister to direct the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to finalise the 4th Cadre Review, initiate time-bound promotions, and restore service parity with other Central Civil Services. The Forum also met with the Cabinet Secretary presenting a detailed memorandum highlighting the "existential crisis" facing one of India’s largest and most functionally embedded civil services.

The CSS, which provides the administrative core to nearly all Ministries and Departments, has not seen a cadre review since long. The last (3rd) cadre review was implemented in 2018 with a five-year delay. To make matters worse, the fourth cadre review, due in 2018, has not yet been implemented with a delay of 7 years and counting, said the forum letter to Cabinet Secretary. 

Despite the formation of a Cadre Review Committee (CRC) on October 27, 2022, the report is yet to be finalised. This has added to a cumulative stagnation of over seven years, affecting promotions, morale, and institutional efficiency.

A comparative analysis of CSS cadre reviews highlighted in the letter of CSS Forum to Cabinet Secretary underscores the deteriorating pace of administrative reforms. It indicates that the earlier cadre review committees’ reports were submitted and implemented within a year of its formation. However, post 2014 there is inordinate delay in finalization of report let alone implementation.

While earlier committees concluded their work in less than a year, the current CRC has yet to submit its report, despite receiving manpower requests from Ministries and Departments by early 2023. It is gathered from various RTI replies that only 24 departments out of all the departments in government need additional staff of approximately 2500 CSS officers at various levels of hierarchy reflecting huge shortfall of staff and impacting government functioning. This strengthens the need of urgent cadre review finalization of the CSS to improve government functioning and reduce the stagnation in the CSS. It is intriguing to note that time taken in finalisation of cadre review in other Central services is also within a year thereby indicating discriminatory treatment to CSS.

The consequences of this structural inertia is manifesting in various forms. Forum highlighted that Under Secretaries who are eligible for promotion are facing acute stagnation as they are waiting for promotion even after completing 12 years of service in the grade against the prescribed residency of 5 years.

Similarly, officers of the 2014 batch of Assistant Section officer Grade in CSS are awaiting their first promotion even after completion of 10 year of service. The issue of promotion of ASO promotions is pending even after repeated public assurances made by MoS (Personnel) Dr Jitendra Singh.