__NOTOC__ Provincial Development Service (PDS) (

IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during ...

: ) is the

Government of Uttar Pradesh The Government of Uttar Pradesh (ISO: Uttar Pradesh Sarkār; often abbreviated as GoUP) is the subnational government of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh with the governor as its appointed constitutional head of the state by the President of I ...

civil service The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leaders ...

responsible for administering rural development programmes of the Uttar Pradesh and Indian governments.

Recruitment

PDS officers are recruited from a pool of applicants who take a competitive examination conducted by the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission. Currently, half of PDS officers are hired directly, while the other half are transferred from other departments. PDS officers, regardless of their mode of entry, are appointed by the

governor of Uttar Pradesh The following is the list of governors of Uttar Pradesh. The list also includes governors of the United Provinces of pre-independent India as well as Independent India from 15 August 1947 to 25 January 1950. The province was renamed Uttar Prade ...

. Hundreds of BDO officer posts remain vacant, putting a greater workload on PDS officers and officers from other departments.

Career progression

After completing their training, a PDS officer generally serves as

block development officer A block is an administrative division of some South Asian countries. Bhutan In Bhutan, a block is called a gewog. It is essentially for oil a group of villages. Gewogs are official administrative units of Bhutan. The country is composed of ...

in blocks in a district. After that, they get promoted as district development officer or as project director of District Rural Development Agency or deputy commissioners of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (popularly known as DC MGNREGA) or deputy commissioners of National Rural Livelihood Mission (popularly known as DC NRLM) and later,

chief development officer A chief business development officer (CBDO) is a position within a company established beside the other executive positions reporting to CEO and COO. The title is used to define a high-ranking position alongside the CEO. The CBDO is expected to have ...

in districts or as joint development commissioners in divisions and as joint commissioners in Commissionerate of Rural Development.

Salary structure

Officer promotion controversy

The union for PDS officers demanded that IAS and PCS officers not be promoted to the rank of CDO, claiming that they have less expertise in rural development than PDS officers. They also claim that it takes much longer for PDS officers to be promoted than PCS or IAS officers, and that PDS officers get paid less than PCS officers. Due to the complaints, the Uttar Pradesh state government reserved twenty-eight districts of Uttar Pradesh for PDS officers. The PDS union opposed this, claiming that the districts that had been reserved for PDS officers were backward ones.

References

{{Civil service Civil Services of Uttar Pradesh 1952 establishments in Uttar Pradesh

Recruitment

Career progression

Salary structure

Officer promotion controversy

See also

References