Indian Forest Service

The Indian Forest Service (IFS) is the premier forest service of India. .The IFS is one of the three All India Services along with the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) & the Indian Police Service (IPS). It was constituted in the year 1966 under the All India Services Act, 1951.
The service implements the National Forest Policy in order to ensure the ecological stability of the country through the protection and participatory sustainable management of natural resources. The members of the service also manage the National Parks, Tiger Reserve, Wildlife Sanctuaries and other Protected Areas of the country. A Forest Service officer is wholly independent of the district administration and exercises administrative, judicial and financial powers in their own domain. Positions in state forest department, such as District/Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Conservator of Forests, Chief Conservator of Forests and Principal Chief Conservator of Forests etc., are held, at times, by Indian Forest Service officers. The highest-ranking Forest Service official in each state is the Head of Forest Forces. A forest service officer also hold positions of Chairman and Member Secretary in the State Pollution Control Boards.
Earlier, the British Government in India had constituted the Imperial Forest Service in 1867 which functioned under the Federal Government until the Government of India Act 1935 was passed and responsibility was transferred to the provinces.
Administration of the Service is the responsibility of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
In 1864, the British Raj established the Imperial Forest Department; Dietrich Brandis, a German forest officer, was appointed Inspector General of Forests. The Imperial Forestry Service was organized subordinate to the Imperial Forest Department in 1867.
Officers from 1867 to 1885 were trained in Germany and France, and from 1885 to 1905 at Cooper's Hill, London, also known as Royal Indian Engineering College. From 1905 to 1926, the University of Oxford (Sir William Schlich), University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh trained Imperial Forestry Service officers.
The modern Indian Forest Service was established in 1966, after independence, under the All India Services Act 1951. The first Inspector General of Forests, Hari Singh, was instrumental in the development of the Forest Service.
India has an area of 635,400 km designated as forests, about 19.32% of the country. India's forest policy was created in 1894 and was subsequently revised in the years 1952 and 1988.
Officers are recruited through an open competitive examination conducted by the UPSC and then trained for about two years by the Central Government at Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy. Their services are placed under various State cadres and joint cadres, being an All India Service they have the mandate to serve both under the State and Central Governments.
They are eligible for State and Central deputations as their counterpart IAS and IPS officers. Deputation of Forest Service officers to the Central Government includes appointments in Central Ministries at the position of Deputy Secretary, Director, Joint Secretary and Additional Secretary etc.; appointments in various Public Sector Units, Institutes and Academies at the position of Chief Vigilance Officer, Regional passport officers, Managing Directors, Inspector General, Director General etc.
On acceptance to the Forest Service, new entrants undergo a probationary period (and are referred to as Officer Trainees). Training begins at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, where members of many civil services are trained for the period of 15 weeks.
On completion of which they go to the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy at Dehradun, for a more intensive training in a host of subjects important to Forestry, Wildlife Management, Biodiversity, Environment Protection, Climate Change, Forest Policies and Laws, Remote Sensing and GIS, Forest Dwellers and Scheduled Tribes. After completion of their training, the officers are awarded a master's degree in Science (Forestry) of Forest Research Institute. The officers are taught more than 56 subjects of life sciences. The officers undergo 13 months of Phase 1 training, then after 4 months of on job training in their respective cadres and finally complete 3 months of Phase 2 training in the academy
They are also taught weapon handling, horse riding, motor vehicle training, swimming, forest and wildlife crime detections. They also go on attachments with different government bodies and institutes such as Indian Military Academy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy, Wildlife Institute of India, Bombay Natural History Society etc. They also undertake extensive tours both in India and a short tour abroad.
After completing training at the academy, candidates go through a year of on-the-job field training in the state to which he or she is assigned, during which they are posted as Assistant Conservators of Forests/ Assistant Deputy Conservators of Forest or Deputy Conservator of Forests.
The Union Government announced a new cadre allocation policy for the All India Services in August 2017.
Under the new policy, a candidate has to rank the five zones in order of preference. Subsequently, the candidate has to indicate one preference of cadre from each preferred zone. The candidate indicates their second cadre preference for every preferred zone subsequently. The process continues till a preference for all the cadres is indicated by the candidate.
Officers continue to work in the cadre they are allotted or are deputed to the Government of India.
Till 2008 there was no system of preference of state cadre by the candidates; the candidates, if not placed in the insider vacancy of their home states, were allotted to different states in alphabetic order of the roster, beginning with the letters A, H, M, T for that particular year. For example, if in a particular year, the roster begins from 'A', which means the first candidate on the roster will go to the Andhra Pradesh state cadre of the Forest Service, the next one to Bihar, and subsequently to Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and so on in alphabetical order. The next year the roster starts from 'H', for either Haryana or Himachal Pradesh (if it had started from Haryana on the previous occasion when it all started from 'H', then this time it would start from Himachal Pradesh). This highly intricate system, in vogue since the mid-1980s, had ensured that officers from different states were placed all over India.
The system of permanent State cadres has also resulted in wide disparities in the kind of professional exposure for officers when we compare officers in small and big and developed and backward states. Changes of state cadre were permitted on the grounds of marriage to an All India Service officer of another state cadre or under other exceptional circumstances. The officer may go to their home state cadre on deputation for a limited period, after which one has to invariably return to the cadre allotted to him or her.
From 2022 to 2028 Forest Service officers were allotted to State cadres at the beginning of their service. There was one cadre for each Indian state, except for two joint cadres: Assam–Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh–Goa–Mizoram–Union Territories (AGMUT). The "insider-outsider ratio" (ratio of officers who were posted in their home states) is maintained as 1:2, with one-third of the direct recruits as 'insiders' from the same state. The rest were posted as outsiders according to the 'roster' in states other than their home states, as per their preference.
Pay structure of Indian Forest Service
The Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Hindi: प्रधान मुख्य वन संरक्षक) is the highest-ranking officer belonging to the Indian Forest Service who is responsible for managing the Forests, Environment and Wild-Life related issues of a state of India. It is the highest rank of an officer of the Indian Forest Service in a State.
At times the states may have more than one post of PCCF and in that case, one of them is designated as the Head of Forest Force (HOFF). HOFF/PCCF is supported by APCCFs, Chief Conservator of Forests, Conservator of Forests, and field level functionaries, such as DFOs and Range Forest officers in their work.
As per media reports, some Forest Service officers have been found corrupt and have been arrested by Central Bureau of Investigation for bribing and corruption.
In 2015, Tehelka reported that more than 30 names of Forest Service officers who might have been awarded dubious or suspect Ph.D. degrees.
The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes has proposed the idea of renaming the Indian Forest Service as the ‘Indian Forest and Tribal Service’.