New Delhi, Apr 20 (PTI) Union minister Jitendra Singh on Sunday asked a group of young civil servants to uphold the highest standards of integrity, accountability, and service, aligning their efforts with the spirit of “Antyodaya — working for the last man standing”.

In an interaction with the officer trainees of the 2023 batch of Indian Administrative Service here, he also hailed the largest women representation in the history of IAS, with 74 women officers making up 41 per cent of the current batch of 180 officers.

Singh, the Minister of State for Personnel, stressed on the importance of grievance redressal mechanisms, urging them to study the online CPGRAMS platform, which he described as a global benchmark.

The Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) allows citizens to raise grievances against government departments online.

“Nearly 26 lakh grievances have been disposed of with a 98 per cent resolution rate, most within 13 days,” said Singh.

The minister urged the young civil servants to uphold the highest standards of integrity, accountability, and service, aligning their efforts with the spirit of “Antyodaya — working for the last man standing”, according to a Personnel Ministry statement.

Sunday’s interaction was part of the ongoing assistant secretary programme, wherein the IAS officer trainees are attached to 46 central ministries for a period of eight weeks from April 1 to May 30, 2025, giving them early exposure to policy formulation and the workings of the central government.

The minister reflected on the inception of the assistant secretary programme in 2015, calling it Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brainchild to give young officers real-time governance exposure at the beginning of their careers.

“The programme has brought a resurgence of confidence among officers. During the pandemic, many of these officers performed remarkably when called upon for district-level crisis management,” Singh added.

As the initiative marks its 10th anniversary, Singh noted its outstanding impact on nurturing capable and confident civil servants.

He also celebrated the “democratisation of civil services”, with increasing representation from states like Punjab, Haryana, and the Northeast, regions that earlier saw fewer selections.

The minister praised the young average age (22–26 years) of the batch, which provides a long-span career trajectory to contribute to the nation. He urged the officers to stay technologically ahead and make full use of the iGOT Karmayogi platform, a digital learning ecosystem offering continuously updated capacity-building modules.

“You are fortunate to be in the best of times, when India is rapidly moving towards becoming Viksit Bharat @2047,” Singh emphasised.

In an open-floor dialogue with the young officers, he expressed support for a more dynamic and flexible civil service ecosystem, where officers may be allowed to gain exposure outside government for a few years and return as domain specialists — a model that he termed “a win-win for both the officer and the government”.

On the issue of bridging the digital divide, the minister called technology a great leveller, citing examples like the Swamitva Mission, which eliminates the need for revenue officials by leveraging drone-based property mapping.

This has democratised access to land records and decentralised service delivery at the grassroots, he said.

“This batch of IAS officers is not only the youngest and most diverse — but also the most representative of new India’s aspirations. Let your work reflect the hopes of a billion people,” Singh said. PTI AKV AKV KVK KVK