It helps to weed out certain perceptual biases with regard to civil services in India esp on civil services day. Some of my acquaintances/friends who are Indian Engineering Service or Indian Forest Service officers claim themselves erroneously to be civil servants.

When in fact they are public servants or government officers. Of course there are overlaps in that most civil servants along with these IES and Indian Forest Service officers belong to Group A services.

Article 312 mentions four All India Services namely IAS, IPS, IFoS and IJS. Till date the fourth service has not been carved yet though there are increasing demands for the same from certain quarters.

Thus, each district of India has IAS, IPS & IFoS officers posted in it for purposes of its overall governance and management. Yet, out of these only officers belonging to IAS & IPS are civil servants.

Though UPSC conducts exams to recruit IES and IFoS officers, notably with the exception of CS Preliminary Exam which serves as the common entry point for both civil service and forest service aspirants the structure of the IES and IFoS Main exam is completely different.

In that the UPSC Civil Services Exam is open to graduates from all disciplines whereas the IES and IFoS ARE essentially restricted exams open to engineering and/or science graduates.

Moreover, as notified by and in accordance with the rules published by DoPT in the Gazzette of India Extraordinary from time to time that is annually there are in effect twenty four civil services for which CSE is conducted each year.

Also, it must be noted that Indian Foreign Service being a civil service is not an All India Service but like the Indian Postal Service and the Indian Railway Traffic Service a Central Service.

Similarly, at the state level, the SPSCs conduct annual examinations to recruit the state civil servants some of which may at a later date become union level civil servants drawn from the promotional channel.

Therefore, the clear-cut inference from this thread is that all civil servants are public servants but not all public servants are civil servants. Having said that, I wish everyone a Happy Civil Services Day!