Civil Servant - As a career option

Introduction

The Indian Civil Service is a myriad of official roles and responsibilities that are assigned to capable individuals selected by the Government of India. There is a variety of levels in the ranking of these officials with each of them befitting a specific position.

The civil services encompass jobs for individuals from every section and sector of the society. It is with this variety of nature that the machinery of the Government of India functions. Civil servants are the wheels that keep the governmental wagon turning.

Civil servants maintain all sorts of profiles, from the top-most positions in the bureaucracy to grade 3 staff members. As the governance of the nation involves responsibilities like lawmaking, administration, enforcement, management, etc. civil servants are the people carrying out these functions and doing the required groundwork.

In a nutshell, a civil servant’s work could be anything between working behind a desk with a stack of files to attending meetings across the nation for matters of dire importance.

Who is a Civil Servant?

There is a wide bracket that makes up for the civil services in India. As we know, the government has a lot of departments that directly or indirectly affect the civil society. Therefore, anyone who is part of the functioning of our government is a civil servant.

Regardless of the nature of an individual’s job, a civil servant is a professional working with the Government of India. The nature of each department has some variations from its other counterparts.

Various Department of Civil Services

• Law Enforcement Department
• Administration Department
• Bureaucracy
• Public Works Department
• Revenue Services
• Education Department
• Irrigation Department
• Agriculture Department

All the aforementioned departments function in a hierarchy with positions ranging from ground-level workers to decision-making officials. To explain this better, lets us consider the example of a premier construction site.

There will be workers who will carry bricks and cement; then, there will be people who will use them to make walls and pillars; and lastly, those who will decide which wall or pillar must be constructed where. Each of the government’s department works in a similar fashion.

Government jobs are much more revered in the society than jobs offered in private organisations and enterprises because these come with an official backing from the nation’s prime authoritative body.

Hence, it doesn’t quite matter what role you play in the mechanism of the government as long as you do it right. Additionally, these jobs have a fixed pay with proper retirement packages and usually come with specified working hours.

Eligibility Criteria to Become a Civil Servant

Applying for a job of the civil servant can be highly beneficiary. The qualifications required to apply civil services varies generally, but as civil services are authorized by the government it ensures as a benchmark to enable maximum candidature, thus being just to all sectors of the society.

Stipulated age brackets, standard qualification requirements and regulated course syllabus are some of the prime features of the civil services exams.

The point here is that with a little self-application and dedication you could absolutely find yourself a job that is both respective and beneficiary in nature.

Higher positions require a graduate degree in any discipline that could be followed by a post-graduation also, from any centrally governed university/college or recognized private university/college.

Lower positions require a high-school pass certificate or intermediate degree with a minimum 50% aggregate from either ICSE, CBSE or respective state boards.

A day in the life of a Civil Servant

Hello. I’m a civil servant. I work at the Public Works Department in a district of India. My job is to oversee the applications of civilians and report them to the higher official in the department.

I work 5 days a week and 8 hours a day. I’m a tier-2 worker of the government machinery and I earn a fixed salary with increments at regular intervals and pension plans. I have a fond liking for the work that I do and the respect that it gets me in society.

It’s not rocket-science but someone has to do the menial groundwork involved in leading the people of India to the heights we envision for them, right? Here’s how a day at work goes:

9:00 AM: I’m beginning my day by going through pending applications for road construction from all over the district. This has been stacking up for a while now. My job here is to see how genuine a problem is and what the government can aid it with.

We get applications from people from all walks of life, and their volume typically far exceeds the capacity of the government in any financial year.

My role is to come up with a refined list of applications based on urgency, pertinence, and outreach to ensure that government money is spent to an optimum productivity.

11:00 AM: I have shortlisted the applications. The ones that have been rejected will be handed over to a junior official who shall summarily inform applicants that the government is unable to help at this time given available information and funding.

The qualifying applications will be present before a higher official in the department who will then appoint official action to them, based on their discretion.

1:00 PM: As of now, 60% of the applications have qualified for presentation before my senior. There is still a hefty set of applications that are left.

As often as possible, we keep unattended applications in a file to cater to once the government finds the means or overcomes intermediate or immediate obstacles.

1:30 PM: Another set of applications have been assessed. These sets are prepared by way of their areas in the district and are updated on an almost daily basis. I’m going to take a halt now to retire for lunch.

Being a senior official, there are a number of junior members of the civil service who report to me. They deal with low impact-factor issues that are down on the government’s list of priorities.

However, I spend about an hour a day signing off on a day’s workload to keep things moving.

2:15 PM: We return to another set of files that are applications for death certificates. These papers just need to be checked and then sent across to more powerful work-station where they will be assigned generation and sent by mail to the families of the deceased.

My work here is to see if the documentation is proper. Usually, the files are neatly and methodically arranged so as to take up as little of my time as possible. It almost always goes with the nod.

3:00 PM: I’ve been informed of three application with incomplete documentation. These people will be contacted by phone and will be asked to submit and complete the documents on a given date.

4:00 PM: Office hours give over now. It’s time to go home. The thing I like about my job is the steady workload and the number of years you have to get used to it.

I usually spend the remainder of my day teaching a small group of underprivileged school kids mathematics.

After a while, serving the society becomes a hobby. Here too, I am a civil servant. Do you also want to become like me?

We hope this article have answered all your queries regarding this profession.

Have your say in a comment box below. Enjoy Reading!