A new policy for cadre allocation has been finalized for Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and other officers, aimed at ensuring "national integration" in the country's top bureaucracy. The new cadre policy for IAS and IPS officers may ensure cohesiveness among these officers as the may get a chance to work in their non-home states, says a DoPT official. Officers of all-India services-the IAS, IPS and Indian Forest Service (IFS)-will have to choose cadres from a set of zones instead of states. The officers of the three services are at present allocated a cadre state or a set of states to work in. They may be posted on central deputation during the course of their service after fulfilling certain eligibility conditions. The existing 26 cadres have been divided into five zones in the new policy proposed by the ministry of personnel, public grievances, and pensions. Zone-I has seven cadres-AGMUT (also known as Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territories), Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Haryana. Zone-II consists of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha, while Zone-III comprises Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam-Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, and Nagaland will constitute Zone-IV, while Zone-V will have Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The new policy will seek to ensure that officers from Bihar, for instance, will get to work in southern and north- eastern states, which may not be their preferred cadres, a personnel ministry official said. "This policy will ensure national integration of the bureaucracy as officers will get a chance to work in a state which is not their place of domicile," the official said. He said the new policy would help in upholding the rationale behind the all-India services. "All-India service officers are supposed to have varied experiences which can be gained when they work in different states, which are new to them. The officers may not be able to experiment new things if they work in their own domicile state," the official said. Under the new policy, candidates appearing for the civil services examination-conducted annually by the Union Public Service Commission-will have to first give their choices in a descending order of preference from among the various zones. "Thereafter the candidates will indicate cadres in order of preference from each zone," the official said. A candidate can list all 26 cadres following this process. The preference for the zones will remain in the same order and no change will be permitted there, the policy said.