Analysing Executive Records data for 4747 IAS officers

2016-02-10

Introduction

A couple of months back I'd written a python script to extract the Executive Record Sheet data, containing official information on all IAS officers in the service. I'd meant to do a short analysis of that dataset but never actually got around to it until recently.

The main reason for procrastination was the fact that the data required a significant effort to munge. I'd started coding up a parsing script but took my time finishing it. The script itself was quite unpythonic in some ways but the result was a nicely formatted JSON dataset that could also be imported to pandas (python library for data analysis).

Data

The final dataset contained all information in the 'Bio Data', 'Educational Qualification', 'Domestic Training', 'Foreign Training' and 'Work Experience' sections of the Executive Record Sheets of 4747 officers. This data was imported as a dataframe and several additional columns were derived from the original ones. The derived columns were:

  • Birth day, Birth month and Birth year (derived using DOB column)
  • Age at recruitment (derived by subtracting Allotment year from Birth Year)
  • Averege profile duration (derived by calculating the difference between 'From' and 'To' dates of all assignments in days and taking the mean)
  • Total profiles (Total assignments that an officer has been assigned throughout the service)
  • Years in service (Difference between 2014 and the allotment year)
  • Transfer Ratio (derived by calculating the ratio between the Total Assignments and years spent in the service, in other words, the number of assignments an officer undertakes per year.)

    • NOTE:

    Analysis

    After splitting the details on birth day, month and year I did a count to see which birth days and birth months were the most common. Turns out, the maximum number of officers were born on the 1st of any given month (a total of 454), with dates that are multiples of 5 occupying the top 5 places. 1st of July and 1st of January seem to be the most promising dates to be born on if someone wants to become an IAS officer!
    The heatmap below shows the Month/Day distribution of the DOBs of officers, with warmer shaded cells implying a high concentration of births on that particular date and cooler shaded cells implying a lower one.

    Birthday Heatmap

    Next, let's plot the frequencies of the 'Age of Recruitment' of officers to see the distribution of the ages at which officers have joined the service. In the figure below, there are 2 distinct peaks of the frequency distribution: mid-20's and early 40's.

    Recruitment age

    Analysing the recruitment ages at the Cadre level, we see that Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar cadre have the lowest median recruitment age of all the cadres.

    Median Mean Std Dev Count
    Cadre
    Rajasthan 25 26.6 4.6 175
    Uttar Pradesh 26 28.7 6.6 405
    Bihar 26 27.0 3.9 188
    Sikkim 26 27.3 5.2 31
    Haryana 26 28.8 6.4 151
    Orissa 26 28.2 6.1 158
    A G M U T 27 30.4 7.5 249
    Telangana 27 30.0 6.4 118
    Tamil Nadu 27 29.2 6.4 248
    Punjab 27 30.4 7.5 174
    Nagaland 27 28.2 4.2 42
    Manipur 27 31.1 8.3 83
    Maharashtra 27 29.4 6.5 270
    Madhya Pradesh 27 30.4 7.2 324
    Kerala 27 29.7 7.1 154
    Karnataka 27 29.6 7.3 204
    Jharkhand 27 31.5 8.3 144
    Himachal Pradesh 27 30.5 8.1 108
    Gujarat 27 30.8 8.4 207
    Assam Meghalaya 27 28.6 6.0 176
    Andhra Pradesh 27 29.4 6.6 160
    Uttaranchal 27 30.0 6.7 84
    West Bengal 27 30.5 7.5 225
    Jammu & Kashmir 28 32.6 8.6 100
    Chhatisgarh 28 30.5 6.8 135
    Tripura 28 32.3 8.4 68

    IAS officers, by the nature of their jobs are generalists who are required to oversee a variety of departments and institutions over the course of their careers. For officers to be effective at any assignment, they need to be given sufficient time to become comfortable in the working environment and role. Frequent changes in the leadership of any department can only lead to instability in the entire department. As such, an analysis of the duration of assignments of IAS officers becomes pertinent. The graph below shows the mean duration (in months) of all the assignments IAS officers have undertaken in their respective cadres.
    This was derived by taking the average duration of assignments for each individual officer in days, then averaging those durations for every cadre.

    As the graph shows, IAS officers in Chattisgarh and Haryana have the lowest average assignment durations, with an officer in these cadres spending only 13 months on an assignment. Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Karnataka take up the subsequent spots on the list with average durations of 13.2, 13.4 and 13.4 months respectively.

    avg_duration

    I further derived the 'Transfer Rate' of officers by dividing the total number of assignments an officer has undertaken by the total years spent in the service. This ratio was derived only for officers who have been in the service for more than 2 years to filter out officers still in their training period. As might be expected, the Transfer Ratio is inversely related to the Average Assignment Duration.

    scatter

    Here is a list of the 15 officers with the highest transfer rates. Dr. Ashok Khemka, who has been in the news in recent times, holds the 11th position on this list with a transfer rate of 2.0 and the longest service period.

    ID_No Name Cadre Allotment_Year Gender DOB Avg_Profile_Duration Total_Profiles Years_In_Service Transfer_Rate
    01UL067201 Shri Nitesh Kumar Jha Uttaranchal 2002 MALE 22/04/1977 304 40 12 3.3
    01CG110E06 Shri Sanjeev Kumar Jha Chhatisgarh 2011 MALE 04/01/1976 200 8 3 2.7
    01UL067202 Ms. Radhika Jha Uttaranchal 2002 FEMALE 09/12/1976 378 30 12 2.5
    01CG110E03 Shri Chandan Kumar Chhatisgarh 2011 MALE 17/01/1985 219 7 3 2.3
    01CG110E02 Shri Deepak Soni Chhatisgarh 2011 MALE 01/01/1985 244 7 3 2.3
    01HY023000 Shri Satyaprakash T L Haryana 2002 MALE 21/03/1976 203 28 12 2.3
    01CG047200 Smt. Shahla Nigar Chhatisgarh 2001 FEMALE 31/03/1973 222 28 13 2.2
    01BH050300 Shri Divesh Sehara Bihar 2005 MALE 07/01/1979 191 19 9 2.1
    01UP065100 Shri M Devaraj Uttar Pradesh 1996 MALE 27/05/1970 163 38 18 2.1
    01AM025200 Dr. M Ariz Ahammed Assam Meghalaya 1995 MALE 12/08/1968 277 40 19 2.1
    01HY020600 Dr. Ashok Khemka Haryana 1991 MALE 30/04/1965 210 47 23 2.0
    01UP108X04 Shri Vaibhav Shrivastava Uttar Pradesh 2009 MALE 01/07/1981 262 10 5 2.0
    01MP110M06 Smt. Neha Marvya Singh Madhya Pradesh 2011 FEMALE 22/08/1986 217 6 3 2.0
    01HP110H01 Shri Lalit Jain Himachal Pradesh 2011 MALE 19/03/1983 270 6 3 2.0
    01CG110E04 Shri Bhoskar Vilas Sandeepan Chhatisgarh 2011 MALE 01/06/1978 256 6 3 2.0