Forum Pakistan

The ICS was composed of the top echelon of the British colonial bureaucratic apparatus, which administered the
countries of South Asia conquered by Great Britain (modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) before 15 August 1947. It began to evolve in the seventeenth century. In 1784 the British parliament passed the Government of India Act, according to which the British possessions in Madras and Bombay came under the authority of the Governor-General of Fort William in *Bengal. In 1833 the office of Governor-General of India was created; from 1858 to 1947 he was called Viceroy and Governor-General of India. The GovernorGeneral of India was the highest official, supervising the work of the civil service and of all the British armed forces in India.

The principal divisions in the ICS in the 1940s included the political department and the departments for external affairs, home affairs, defence, revenue, finances, transport, communications, agriculture, justice, education, health, land, and others. Until the end of the nineteenth century, only highly paid members of the upper stratum of British society could be servants of the ICS. As a rule they were specially trained at Haileybury College, which opened in England in 1804. Although members of higher Indian society were granted access to the ICS in the course of the eventually reforms of Minto-Morley in 1909, Montagu-Chelmsford in 1919, and successive the Government of India Act of 1935, even as late as 1947 only 549 out of the 1,157 members of the ICS (47.4 per cent) were of Indian origin. After the declaration of independence of India and Pakistan the ICS was reorganised, in India, as the Indian Administrative Service, and in Pakistan, as the *Civil Service of Pakistan.

In the vassal states of India functions similar to that of the ICS were performed by the Indian Political Service, whose members were recruited from British officers of the colonial army, the police, and also from members of the ICS.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: 'Asian Bureaucratic System' (ed.) R. Braibanti, Durham, 1969; E. Blunt, 'The Indian Civil Service', London, 1937.