4
New Delhi: The All India Services, inherited from the British Raj, were designed to maintain an administrative machinery that answered to the colonial state.
Independent India retained this structure, giving its officers enormous authority over revenue, policing, land, public funds and the implementation of government policy. Decades later, the question is whether a system built around a powerful, insulated bureaucracy has outlived its usefulness.
When senior officers accused of corruption can return to government positions while investigations drag on for years, the problem appears to extend beyond individual misconduct to the institutional design itself.
The question is no longer merely whether a few corrupt officers should be punished. It is whether the country needs to rethink an administrative structure in which authority is concentrated in a permanent cadre, while accountability often moves at a considerably slower pace.
If the All India Services cannot ensure that public power is exercised transparently and that serious allegations are resolved promptly, the case for fundamental reform, including whether the existing structure should be abolished and replaced, can no longer be dismissed as unthinkable.
When Odisha Vigilance arrested IAS officer Dhiman Chakma in June 2025, alleging he took a Rs 10 lakh bribe at his Kalahandi residence and recovering another Rs 47 lakh from the premises, it looked like an enforcement system doing its job. Yet less than a year later, a May 2026 notification reinstated him as Deputy Secretary in the Revenue and Disaster Management Department. The government noted the reinstatement was not an acquittal.
That misses the objection entirely. The question is not whether he was cleared, but why an officer facing a corruption probe is allowed to return to the very department responsible for administering revenue while his case remains undecided.
He is no outlier. Across the country, agencies routinely produce images of cash stacked on tables and luxury watches arranged for cameras, only for the accused to quietly slip back into the bureaucracy.
Punjab IPS officer Harcharan Singh Bhullar, arrested by the CBI in October 2025, was reportedly found with around Rs 7.5 crore in cash, 2.5 kg of gold jewellery and 26 luxury watches. In Rajasthan, Dainik Bhaskar’s report linked IAS officer Shikhar Agrawal and his IPS officer wife, Prashakha Mathur, to the purchase of 40 villas and cottages worth Rs 6.16 crore, raising questions about their property disclosures.
Jharkhand offers another example of this cycle. Pooja Singhal, a 2000-batch IAS officer, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in May 2022 over the alleged diversion of MGNREGA funds. Despite the ED attaching properties worth Rs 82.77 crore, including a super-speciality hospital and land parcels in Ranchi, the state government revoked her suspension and reinstated her after she secured bail in December 2024.
The roster of senior tax officials is similarly extensive. When the CBI arrested IRS officer Amit Kumar Singhal over an alleged bribery demand, the agency reportedly recovered approximately Rs 1 crore in cash, 3.5 kg of gold and 2 kg of silver. By May 2026, the CBI had registered a disproportionate-assets case against Singhal and his wife, alleging assets worth Rs 4.57 crore beyond their known income.
Another IRS officer, Vinay Kumar Kantheti, was arrested in August 2026 in an alleged Rs 40 lakh bribery case, with searches yielding an additional Rs 43 lakh in cash and jewellery valued at Rs 90 lakh. Following a protracted legal battle over his initial bail, Kantheti was traced to Rishikesh and taken into CBI custody in September.
Haryana presents a different but equally troubling dimension of the problem: institutional failure. The CBI’s investigation into the alleged diversion of hundreds of crores of government funds through IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank names six IAS officers among 19 accused. The chargesheet details allegations of criminal conspiracy, cheating and falsified accounts, alongside claims of gold coins delivered to government bungalows and lavish parties funded by bankers.
Beyond the criminal liability of individual officers, the broader question is how administrative and financial controls have repeatedly failed on such a massive scale.
In Bihar, the gap between investigation and accountability has widened over years. Sanjeev Hans, an IAS officer arrested by the ED in October 2024 in a money-laundering investigation, is now a member of the state’s Board of Revenue, a posting that sits uneasily beside the gravity of the allegations.
The process required to even prosecute an officer is equally fraught, as seen with Bihar IPS officer Amit Lodha. A disproportionate-assets case was registered against Lodha in December 2022. By January 2024, the Patna High Court had refused to quash the FIR and directed that the investigation be taken to its logical conclusion within six months. Instead, the case remained caught in the process of obtaining prosecution approvals.
As reported by Read in September 2026, Bihar had granted sanction for prosecution while Central approval had remained pending even as Lodha was promoted to Additional Director General. In an interesting turn of events, following the report, the state government silently withdrew its sanction against Lodha.
When a government reverses such a decision after years of delay, it owes the public an explanation, but none was given.
None of this requires evidence that a particular minister protected a specific officer. It requires an examination of administrative decisions taken by identifiable governments. Reinstating an officer, advancing a promotion, delaying an approval or withdrawing a sanction all carry profound repercussions for public trust.
Political leaders routinely claim credit for the work carried out by the executive under their direction.
They cannot claim credit for the administration’s achievements while disowning responsibility when the same machinery is implicated in corruption. If the political leadership expects to be credited for the executive’s performance, it must also answer for the failures of oversight that allow corruption to persist within it.
The bureaucracy administers public money and implements the policies of elected governments. Its credibility is inseparable from the political executive that supervises it.
After the cameras have left post the high-profile raid, an officer’s career continues through a cycle of suspension, reinstatement and promotion.
The ultimate test of an anti-corruption system is not the weight of the cash seized on the day of a raid. It is whether cases reach a conclusion, proceeds of crime are recovered, and those found guilty face lasting consequences. If the cycle repeatedly ends with the accused back inside the same system, the message to the bureaucracy is clear: the immediate costs of being caught are temporary, and final accountability can be postponed indefinitely.
India should no longer treat the structure inherited from the Raj as beyond question. If the All India Services cannot be made genuinely accountable to the public and the elected government, the country must be prepared to consider whether they should be fundamentally restructured or abolished and replaced with a system better suited to a democratic republic.