15% IAS officers claim to own no land, house

NEW DELHI: Of the around 3,600 Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers who have been filing immoveable property returns (IPR) since 2010, 559 or 14.5% declared that they have no property, whether land, building or house, in their submission to the Centre for the financial year 2014.

Analysis of immoveable property returns by factly.in, a website that aims to make public data more meaningful to citizens, shows that the highest number of officials who claimed to own no property were from Uttar Pradesh (57), followed by Madhya Pradesh (42), AGMUT (37), Maharashtra (33) and Tamil Nadu (31).

Former chief information commissioner and erstwhile bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah said, "It is possible for 14.5% of the officers not to have any property but I won't think it is credible. It is a somewhat high number for officials or their spouses not to have any property."

He added that officers at the beginning of their career may not have property but by mid-career, most of them did.

Factly.in analyzed IPRs filed by IAS officers from 2010-2014 to find that 14.6% that is 661 of 3,865 had defaulted at least once in filing their returns. According to the department of personnel and training (DoPT), there are 4,526 IAS officials of which 3,865 filed their returns for all years since 2010.

The worst performing batch where most number of officials (83.7%) defaulted at least once in filing returns was the 2013 batch. The worst performing cadre was Tripura with only 38.2% compliance. Among the best performing batch was 1977 with 100% compliance while the cadre was Maharashtra with 96.3% compliance.

As per rules notified under the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, every public servant has to file declaration, information and annual returns of his assets and liabilities as on March 31, every year, on or before July 31 of that year.

According to the Lokpal Act, a public servant needs to furnish to the competent authority information relating to the assets of which he, his spouse and his dependent children, jointly or severally, own. DoPT has also developed an online system named Property Related Information System (Prism) for IAS officers to file their revised property returns.