The list of the 1978 IAS officers put on the panel for promotion as secretaries to the Government of India and equivalent posts is finally out. Only 45 of the 101 officers of the 1978 batch made it to the final list, including eight of them for the equivalent posts.

The effect of the prime minister's principal secretary Pulok Chatterji, a 1974 batch IAS officer from Uttar Pradesh cadre, is quite visible as the list includes the highest number of 11 officers from U.P. alone, while the Kerala cadre officers who occupied the cream of top posts during the tenure of his predecessor TKA Nair, a retired IAS, could get two berths only and that too in the secondary line of the equivalent posts.

Sources said the list was thrice pruned to meet the criteria laid down by the prime minister, who cleared it Tuesday night before emplaning for Maldives for the SAARC summit the next morning and the establishment officer of the Department of Personnel & Training posted it on its website Wednesday evening.

Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka have three officers each on the list, while Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and Jharkhand come next with two officers each. Only one each could make it from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa in the list that will be now used for appointments as the secretaries as and when the vacancies arise in the course of the next two years. Intriguingly, not a single IAS officer of West Bengal cadre figures in the list.

The senior bureaucrats are a disgruntled lot, unhappy at the UPA-II government's personnel policy. They allege that promotions and postings to the top slots in the bureaucracy are increasingly becoming political while the PMO is also getting into the internal squabbles of the IAS officers.

Their grievance is that the personnel policy has become "so much screwed and constipated" as a former cabinet secretary remarked that they have to wait for more than six months to one year to get their turn and many get superannuated by that time. Promotions as Secretaries to the Government of India in the UPA-II regime have become an exercise parallel to the union carbide reshuffle, they affirm.

Meanwhile, the information note on the official list of the 1978 batch IAS officers "empanelled" for appointment as Secretary and Secretary equivalent posts at the Centre also includes name of the previous 1977 batch's IAS officer Madhav Lal(56) of the J&K cadre.

The cadre-wise names of the officers in the list are: S R Rao, P Panneervel and M M Srivastava of Gujarat, Arvind Mayaram, Rajiv Mehrishi and Ashish Bahuguna of Rajasthan, Lakshmi Venkatachalam, K N Srivastava and A P Joshi of Karnataka, Rakesh Singh and Sudhir Mittal of Punjab, Anil Goswami and Pankaj Jain of J&K, Rahul Asthana of Maharashtra, R Parasuram of Madhya Pradesh, R Bhattacharya of Andhra Pradesh and Gokul Chandra Pati of Orissa.