The Lost PhDcrats

• Dr Rakesh Sarwal: PhD from Johns Hopkins in public health. Currently heads the handicrafts development division.
  
• Dr Prasanta Mahapatra: PhD in public health, Harvard. Has never served in the health sector.
  
• Shikha Dubey: MBA from an Australian university. Now posted with the Madhya Pradesh animal husbandry department.
  
• Dr Ranjit Banerjee: MSc, London School of Economics. Posted to the ministry of urban development.
  
• P.K. Patnaik: MBA, Hull University, UK. Posted as private secretary to minister of animal husbandry.

Many would say that foreign-educated babus have thrown up a new challenge for the IAS as well as its controlling authority, the DoPT. Since 2001, when the government took a decision to stop accepting foreign funding to send officers for training, the numbers of those going abroad have gone down considerably. Even courses conducted at prestigious schools like the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard were dropped, as these were considered "too expensive". However, when several Ivy League US schools came together with Citibank to offer an education loan scheme, several IAS and ips officers took the plunge.

In 2003, Srivatsa Krishna, an IAS topper from the 1994 batch, broke new ground when he went to Harvard Business School. He had also co-authored a paper with top management guru Michael Porter on how IT clusters were built in Andhra Pradesh. Subsequently, Krishna rejected offers from top equity firms and joined the World Bank as a senior economic advisor. Such cases, say DoPT officials, can serve as a vital link for India's global aspirations as it seeks a bigger role in a globalised village.

Like Krishna, several officers took unpaid leave to work in the private sector to pay off their loans. Some were lucky, such as M. Pratap, an ips officer who was part of the class of 2003 at Wharton Business school. The university, under a special scheme, waived off his loan when he joined as additional secretary to AP chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. But others have not been as lucky. As a result, many officers have not reported back for duty. This has led to the phenomenon often jocularly referred to as the "missing expat babu".

Rita Singh, a 1997 batch UP cadre officer, took six months leave in 2004 to study in the US. Since then, the government has not heard from her and she has been listed in the IAS civil list as "absent without leave". According to DoPT officials, a person missing without leave for over a year can be deemed as having resigned from the cadre. Similar was the case of Santanu Mukherjee, a 1990 batch Assam-Meghalaya cadre officer. He left on study leave in 1998, and is in the list of the missing.

Questions have been raised about state governments according permission to foreign-educated IAS officers to work in the private sector. Sanjeev Kaushik, a 1992 batch Kerala cadre IAS officer, went to London Business School for higher studies. AnMBA in finance, Kaushik was granted permission by the state government to work with Lehman Brothers in India. DoPT sources told Outlook that they have written to the Kerala government, pointing out that it did not have the jurisdiction to grant Kaushik any such permission.

"You have to understand that no other employer in the world is as generous as the Indian government," says a senior DoPT official. "You are granted five years of leave to pick up new skills. But you have been selected and trained by the government of India for a purpose and you must adhere to that."

But many ambitious bureaucrats do not see it that way. For them, one should capitalise upon an opportunity to study abroad. And many argue that if coming back to the civil service means being posted to departments where their specialisation is of little use, then why not go where their talents are recognised and valued? A logical, though rather unpatriotic and selfish, line of thinking.