The Indian Civil Service (ICS), which after 1886 was officially called the Imperial Civil Service and was also known as the British India Civil Service, was the civil service of the Government of India in the period of the British Raj. Its members were appointed under Section XXXII of the Government of India Act, 1858 of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
At the time of the Partition of India in 1947, the ICS was divided between the new dominions of India and Pakistan. Although these are now organised differently, the contemporary Civil Services of India and the Pakistan Civil Service are both descended from the old ICS.
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From 1858, after the demise of the East India Company's rule in India, the British civil service took on its administrative responsibilities. The cause of the change in governance had been the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which came close to toppling British rule in the country.[1] In the beginning, the British civil service was a key institution in maintaining a colonial form of rule over the Provinces of British India, its major tasks including law and order functions. The different provinces controlled their own civil services.
After 1858, there was a clear distinction between the 'Indian Civilians' of the ICS, who were government officials, and the military officers of the Indian Army, and a career in both was unusual. Before 1858, the officers of the East India Company's Presidency Armies were company employees, like its administrators, and a career in both was not unusual.
| “ | An appointment to the civil service of the Company will not be a matter of favour but a matter of right. He who obtains such an appointment will owe it solely to his own abilities and industry. It is undoubtedly desirable that the civil servants of the Company should have received the best, the most finished education that the native country affords (the Report insisted that the civil servants of the Company should have taken the first degree in arts at Oxford or Cambridge Universities). | ” |
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—Macaulay Committee Report[2] |
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The competitive examination for entry to the civil service was combined for the Diplomatic, the Home, the Indian, and the Colonial Services. Candidates must be aged between 21 and 24, which gave everyone three chances for entry. The total marks possible for the examination were 1,900. Successful candidates underwent one or two years probation in England, according to whether they had taken the London or the Indian examination. This period was spent at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, or the School of Oriental Studies in London, where a candidate studied Law and the procedures of India, including criminal law and the Law of Evidence, which all gave the knowledge and the idea of the revenue system, reading Indian history and learning the language of the Province to which they had been assigned.
By 1920, there were a total of five methods of entry into the higher civil service: firstly, the open competitive examinations in London; secondly, separate competitive examinations in India; thirdly, nomination in India to satisfy provincial and communal representation; fourthly, promotion from the Provincial Civil Service and lastly, appointments from the bar which by one-fourth of the posts, out of the total posts reserves for the ICS, were to be filled from the bar.[3]
There were two exclusive groups of civil servants during the formative stage of direct British rule in India. The higher employees who entered into covenants with the Company came to be known as "covenanted" servants, whereas those not signing such agreements came to be known as "uncovenanted". The latter group generally filled the lower positions. This distinction between the covenanted and the uncovenanted virtually came to an end with the constitution of the Imperial Civil Service of India based on the recommendations of the Public Service Commission, 1886–87, though the phrase covenanted continued to be used of anyone in a salaried position with a long term contract — including boxwallah peddlers. The name Imperial Civil Service was changed to Civil Service of India. However, the term Indian Civil Service (ICS) persisted. The acronym ICS continued to be used to denote the covenanted civil servants.
A third group, the Statutory Civil Service which functioned in the second half of the nineteenth century, was disbanded by the beginning of the 1890s. To this group were recruited young men from respectable and affluent Indian families. This service was replaced by the provincial civil services, which was constituted on the basis of the recommendations of the Aitchison Commission. It consisted of two cadres, Provincial Civil Service and Subordinate Civil Service. Further developments took place as a result of the application of the scheme of cadre organization to the administrative departments. Thus, for example, the departments of Forest and Public Works had both the imperial, and provincial branches. The basic pattern of the cadre system in the civil service was thus established following the recommendations of the Aitchison Commission.
In 1912, the Islington Commission was appointed, but its report could be published only in 1917, by which time its recommendations had become outdated due to the First World War and Edwin Montagu's August Declaration presented before the House of Commons on August 20 1917, that in order to satisfy the local demands, the government was interested in giving more representation to the native Indian population. Therefore, no consideration was given to them. By 1934, the system of administration in India came gradually to consist of seven All India Services and five Central Departments, all under the control of the Secretary of State, and three Central Departments under joint Provincial and Imperial control. The ICS and the Indian Police (Service) were in the 'transferred field', that is, the authority for the control of these services and for making appointments were transferred from the Secretary of State to the provincial governments. It seems relevant to mention that the All India and class I central services were designated as Central Superior Services as early as 1924 in the Lee Commission's report.
At the time of the partition of India, the Indian Civil Service was divided between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. The parts which went to India retained the name "Indian Civil Service", while Pakistan renamed the parts it inherited as the "Civil Service of Pakistan" (CSP).
Dewey has commented that "in their heyday they [Indian Civil Service officers] were the most powerful officials in the Empire, if not the world. A tiny cadre, a little over a thousand strong, ruled more than 300,000,000 Indians. Each Civilian had an average 300,000 subjects, and each Civilian penetrated every corner of his subjects' lives, because the Indian Civil Service directed all the activities of the Anglo-Indian state."[4]
Speaking in the House of Commons in 1935, former British prime minister David Lloyd George said of the ICS that it was "the steel frame on which the whole structure of government and of administration in India rests".[5]
At about the same time, Jawaharlal Nehru, later the first Prime Minister of India, wrote
I think it was Voltaire who defined the "Holy Roman Empire" as something which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Just as someone else once defined the Indian Civil Service, with which we are unfortunately still afflicted in this country, as neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service.[6][7]
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