GDS to MTS Quota: Seniority or Exam, and the 2023 Change Most Miss

Ask a group of Gramin Dak Sevaks how MTS posts are shared out and many will say “a quarter by exam”. That was true under the 2018 rules. It stopped being true on 30 August 2023, when the Department amended the MTS Recruitment Rules by GSR 639(E). Since then the order is: casual labourers first, then whatever is left is split half by seniority and half by the competitive exam. For a GDS deciding whether to spend a year preparing, the difference between a quarter and a half is the whole question.

This guide lays out the old and new rules side by side, then works through West Bengal’s 2026 vacancy table, the one full circle table we have, to show how the rule turns into numbers — including why the exam there ended up with more than half.

Official: GSR 639(E) of 30.08.2023 as reproduced in the West Bengal notification of 01.06.2026, and its Annexure II-B.

The 2018 schedule had two parts: Part I for the 510 posts in administrative offices, and Part II for the 37,240 in subordinate offices. Most GDS work under Part II, which is where the 50 : 25 : 25 split applied. The exam share was a quarter, and it was offered first to GDS of the recruiting division, then to other divisions of the circle, then to the open market.

Three changes matter to a GDS. First, the exam share doubled, from a quarter to half of the GDS pool. Second, the exam became circle-wide from the start: it is “restricted to GDS of the recruiting Postal Circle”, with no division-first step. Third, casual labourers moved from a fixed quarter to a first claim on everything — which sounds alarming but, as West Bengal’s table shows, may mean little in practice, because the pool of eligible casual labourers engaged before 1993 is finite and shrinking. That last point is our reading, not something the rules say.

A word on the amendment number, because it is often mixed up. The Department issued two amendments on 30.08.2023: GSR 638(E) for the Postman and Mail Guard rules and GSR 639(E) for the MTS rules. The West Bengal notification cites them that way. A page that quotes 639(E) for the Postman quota has the wrong one.

The two routes are not alternatives you choose between; they run in parallel. A GDS with twelve years of service near the top of the division’s seniority list may be taken on without an exam. A GDS with four years has only the exam. Anyone with three years or more can sit the exam whatever their seniority, and many do, because the seniority queue in a division moves only as fast as that division’s own vacancies.

West Bengal’s notification of 01.06.2026 carries the most complete MTS vacancy table we found for 2026 (Annexure II-B, provisional). It starts from 224 posts for the year. It then takes out compassionate appointments and the sports quota — each column headed “5% of DR” — before splitting the rest between seniority and the exam.

The headings say 50% and 50%, but the totals are 92 and 110. The notification itself hints at why: it describes the MTS vacancies for the exam as the CE vacancies “and unfilled vacancy of Seniority-cum-fitness quota, if any”. It does not say how many. The division rows show where the difference sits.

Here is our arithmetic from the 44 rows. In eight units the seniority column is 0 and every net post goes to the exam: Kolkata GPO (7), Central Kolkata (7), Midnapore (3), Foreign Post Kolkata (2), Circle Office (2), MMS Kolkata (1), RLO Kolkata (1) and GM (PA&F) (1). Those eight rows put 24 posts in the exam and none in seniority. Across the other rows the split is 92 seniority to 86 exam — close to half each, with odd numbers rounded sometimes one way and sometimes the other (East Kolkata’s 13 became 7 and 6; Nadia South’s 3 became 1 and 2).

Why those eight rows have no seniority share is not stated. Several are offices that are their own recruiting units under the unified MTS cadre — the Circle Office, RLO, Mail Motor Service, the foreign post office and the accounts office — and the seniority quota is filled from GDS of the recruiting division or unit, which suggests there may be no GDS on their rolls to take it. That is our inference. For Kolkata GPO, Central Kolkata and Midnapore we have no explanation to offer, and we do not guess one.

Our reading, not an official instruction. The exam share is now the larger door in most years, and it is circle-wide, so a well-prepared GDS in a division with few vacancies can still be selected elsewhere in the circle through preferences. The seniority route rewards patience; the exam rewards a single morning’s Paper-I, where merit is decided on one 100-mark paper with qualifying marks of 40% (UR), 37% (OBC/EWS) and 33% (SC/ST/PwBD). The common exam pattern guide has the question counts by block.

It also means that the number that matters to you each year is not the circle’s total MTS vacancies but the exam column, category by category. In West Bengal 2026 an ST candidate was competing for 3 exam posts across the whole circle, an EWS candidate for 12 and a UR candidate for 63. Our circle-wise vacancies guide collects the tables that have been published.