2.3 A more important characteristic of the civil service system at the Centre is, however, its classification based on the concept of the `Service'. Under this concept, civilian posts are grouped into distinct homogenous cadres under a common `Service' named on the basis of specific functions attached to the posts in question. The Study Team on Personnel Administration appointed by the Administrative Reforms Commission (1969) appropriately defined a `cadre' as follows:-

`Acadre comprises persons who have been adjudged suitable and recruited to hold a group of position requiring similar skills-technical, professional and/or administrative, within a Service there may be more than one grade arranged vertically according to the level of responsibity'(7).

Having laid down the working definition of a Service or cadre as above, the Study Team went on to spell out the specific requirments for the constitution of a Service as:-

i) determining duties and responsibilities of various positions;

ii) translating these in terms of skill requirements;

iii) grouping of positions which broadly require similar skills; and

iv) gradation of position in terms of responsibilities.

According to the Study Team, the concept so developed further presupposes that within a Service positions at same level are analogous and any member of the service qualified to hold that grade or position can be posted. Thus while constituting a Service, positions are not only examined with reference to skill requirement and graded but it is also determined whether those positions are also inter-changeable.(8)

2.4 The Study Team's propositions reproduced above give a fairly good idea of what a Service or an organised cadre is. As this Monograph is concerned with Group `A' Service/Cadres of the Central Government, the concept will be further explained in the following paragraphs with specific reference to Group `A' Services.

2.5 A Central Group `A' Service represents a group of posts belonging to a distinct functional area arranged in a hierarchical order representing different grades or levels of responsibility. All the posts in the Service carry the same functions involving specific skills. They are thus unifunctional. They only differ in rank and status corresponding to given levels of responsibility attached to different grades of posts. The hierarchical arrangement of posts alongwith the pay scales attached to different grades constitutes what may be called a cadre and the arrangement itself is known as a cadre structure.

2.6 Members of a Service are expected to possess an intimate knowledge of the particular area or the function or the skill concerned. For example, the Central Engineering Service (CES)is the name of a service whose members are all civil engineers performing functions in the area of Engineering. To become a members of CES, it is essential that one should possess a basic qualification on the subject matter, i.e. Engineering. At successively higher levels in a functional area, as the managerial content and the responsibility steadily increases the members themseleves may belong to different grades corresponding to different levels of responsibility and carrying different scales of pay. So are the Indian Revenue Service performing functions in the area of revenue (income-tax), Indian Information Service catering to the information needs of the Government.

2.7 There are three All-India Services which are all Group `A' Services, namely, the Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service and Indian Forest Service. These are common to the Centre and the States. The manpower for performing the functions of the Central Government is, however, mainly provided by Central Services and cadres. The Central Group `A' Services organised into regular cadres  account for the bulk of the Group `A' posts under the Central Government. They are broadly classified into (I) Non-Technical service, (II) Technical Service (which include engineering services), (III) Health Services and (IV) Other Services (which includes some engineering and scientific services) . A complete list of Services alongwith their present cadre strength (to extent available) is given at the end of this Section.

2.8 The non-technical services are meant to administer non-technical areas of administration at the Centre like audit, income-tax, posts and railways. The technical services perform similar functions on the technical side of the Central Government in departments like Civil Engineering, Telegraph Engineering, Mechnical Engineering, etc. The Group `A' category also includes officers engaged in research in the scientific and technological fields besides isolated - so called General Central Services - posts in the non-technical fields.