There are 44 secretary-level officers who are due to retire from service during the current calendar year. This is about one-fourth of all such officers employed in different ministries of the Union government.

And almost all of them belong to the Indian Administrative Service. The number in itself may not be too large, but it is significant because this level of departure over the next 12 months is bound to have implications for the entire civil service and governance.

Consider the following. These vacancies at the top will be filled as and when they arise, meaning that the recruitment exercise will be spread over almost the entire calendar year. This will have a chain effect on other IAS officers down the hierarchy.

Where will the 44 officers come from to replace those who superannuate this year? Most of them will be from the current batch of additional secretary-level officers. And if you add the seven vacancies that will arise for additional secretary-level officers in 2006, the total number of posts of additional secretaries to be filled up during the current year will further go up.

For the joint secretary-level officers, the number of vacancies to be filled up will be even larger. Already, 67 joint secretary-level officers will be completing their tenure in the various central ministries and will have to be reverted to their parent states during the current year. Add to this the 157 vacancies in the rank of deputy secretary and director, the annual exercise of filling up vacancies under the central staffing scheme will be much more than the 275 posts that the ministry of personnel claims it has to fill during 2006.

You might argue that this rate of departure and the consequent task of filling up the vacancies are not unusual. This is more or less the pace at which vacancies take place almost every year.

That is true, but this is surely a cause for concern for a government that wants to provide greater stability of tenure among top civil servants. More than a year ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had mooted the idea of a minimum tenure of two years for all district administrators. That statement came in the wake of several instances of ruling party politicians, at the state and district level, forcing transfer of district magistrates before elections to suit their political ends. No follow-up action has as yet been taken to implement that directive from the prime minister.

And now the National Advisory Council of the United Progressive Alliance government has suggested that not only district administrators, but secretaries to the government, too, should be given a minimum tenure of two years in one job.

There is an interesting aspect of the NAC recommendation. If, for some reasons, the existing incumbent in a secretary-level post cannot complete the minimum tenure of two years, the remaining period of that tenure should be added to the tenure of the new officer recruited in that position. This, the NAC note has argued, will ensure greater stability of tenure in senior government positions.

For the Manmohan Singh government, implementing such a suggestion will prove to be its toughest challenge. The problem is not with the total number of secretary-level officers retiring every year. In fact, a departure rate of one-fourth of the total number of secretary-level officers can theoretically give every officer at least a minimum tenure of two years.

The problem arises because every year, the induction of new secretaries invariably results in a reshuffle of even those secretaries who may not have completed a minimum tenure of two years.

If the ministry of personnel is serious about the suggestion made by the NAC, it should start the current year with an announcement that no existing secretary will be reshuffled until he or she completes two years in the same job.

Let the 44 secretary-level officers retire during the year and the consequent vacancies be filled by those additional secretaries who have been empanelled for promotion as secretaries.

Several ministers might not like this as they will lose an opportunity to replace their existing secretaries with those who are their favourites. But the embargo on transfer of secretaries from one department to another will ensure that the secretaries get a minimum two years in their existing posts.