When Divya Mittal an IIT Delhi and IIM Bangalore graduate, former JPMorgan associate in London, and 2013-batch IAS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre announced her resignation on Sunday, the reaction followed a familiar script.
She held a B.Tech from IIT Delhi and a postgraduate management degree from IIM Bangalore, worked as an associate at JPMorgan in London between 2007 and 2008, and returned to India to clear the UPSC Civil Services Examination. Over 13 years, she served as district magistrate of Sant Kabir Nagar, Mirzapur and Deoria before being moved to Lucknow this past May as Special Secretary in the state’s Revenue Department the post she held at the time of her resignation. But strip away the individual story, and Mittal’s resignation fits into a pattern that has quietly become one of Indian bureaucracy’s recurring talking points: high-profile, high-pedigree officers stepping away from the IAS mid-career, often without fully explaining why. Mittal’s career had all the markers that make an IAS resignation a national story rather than a routine service record update.
The headline-versus-data gap
Government data shared in Parliament shows that roughly 300 officers resigned or took voluntary retirement from the IAS, IPS and IFS combined over more than three decades, between 1995 and 2025. Even accounting for undercounting, that puts the exit rate at a little over 4 percent of the total cadre strength a fraction of the attrition typically seen in the corporate world. The comparatively more porous service turns out to be the Indian Revenue Service, not the IAS: 853 IRS officers resigned or opted for voluntary retirement between 2014 and 2024, according to a government reply in the Lok Sabha, split roughly between the Income Tax and Customs wings.
There is also a structural nuance that gets lost in the coverage: a meaningful share of “exits” from one service are actually lateral moves within the civil services ecosystem, such as IPS officers later qualifying for the IAS through the same examination cycle, rather than officers leaving government altogether. The IFS has seen the fewest departures, with the Ministry of External Affairs telling the Rajya Sabha that only three IFS officers took voluntary retirement in the preceding five years.
