01 August, 2012 
When Chief Ministers come to power in India, they extensively reshuffle civil servants postings. This column asks why state politicians transfer bureaucrats, whether they favour loyalty over competence, what this means for the administrative efficiency of the Indian state, and what can be done about it.
Within an hour of being named Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in March 2012, Akhilesh Yadav had reshuffled the bureaucrats who served in the Chief Minister’s secretariat. In his first month as the Chief Minister, more than 1,000 officers of the state’s administrative and police services had been moved to new positions. Officers who were perceived to be ‘loyalists’ of the previous Chief Minister, Kumari Mayawati, were moved to less prestigious posts. In his swift and large-scale reappointments of career bureaucrats, Mr Yadav exceeded the record set by his predecessor, who had transferred more than 1,000 officials in her first six months as Chief Minister in 2007. While transferring bureaucrats from department to department is nothing new in India, the above case illustrates how acute an issue it has become. Why do Indian politicians engage in such widespread transfers of bureaucrats? How does such behaviour affect the career incentives of bureaucrats and what does this mean for ‘administrative efficiency' - or more simply, getting things done in India.
Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service
In recent research we set out to answer these questions by looking at data on the careers of 2,800 officers in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) over the period 1980 to 2004 (Iyer and Mani 2012). IAS officers are recruited using a nationwide exam. Once recruited, IAS officers are assigned to specific states, where they serve for the majority of their careers. State-level politicians in India cannot hire, dismiss, demote or change the wages of IAS officers. But they can, and do, transfer bureaucrats quite regularly - especially more so since the 1990s. In our data, IAS officers spend on average only 16 months in any specific post; they have a 53% probability of being appointed to a new position in a given year. Uttar Pradesh is by no means unusual in the matter of Chief Minister-led transfers: we find that a change in Chief Minister leads to a 5 percentage point increase in the probability of bureaucrat transfers across all states of India. Figure 1 below illustrates this dramatically for the state of Tamil Nadu: the vertical lines indicate years in which a new Chief Minister came to power in the state.