MP govt smokescreen over IAS officers’ arbitrary transfers, GoI in dark too

Special Correspondent

NewsBits.in

Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh government continues to keep a smokescreen around the decisions on transfers of Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officers and undertake arbitrary transfers in gross violation of All India Services Act, 1951.

So much so that it has failed to provide information on the transfers to the government of India or make it public by putting it up on the website of state general administration department (GAD) by January 1, as required under the law.

The extent of arbitrariness of the decisions to transfer IAS officers was on display recently, when the chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan issued a telephonic order to transfer senior IAS officer Prabhanshu Kamal, the then principal secretary of medical education department, after finding some irregularities during an inspection visit to Gandhi Medical College and Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal.

According to the existing law, the state government are to forward the details on transfers of IAS officers, along with the detailed minutes of the State Civil Services Board to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) of the GoI on every January 1. Also the state governments are to display the details on website of its department concerned (GAD in case of MP) by the same date.

Right to Information activist Ajay Dubey, who got this information through an RTI application, raised question on Sunday as why the state government had not followed these rules and not made the information public.

The main point related to the IAS officers’ transfer is that under the All India Services Act norms, all the state governments are to constitute Civil Services Board and get the transfer decisions approved by the board. Also the IAS officers are to be given a minimum tenure of two years on a particular posting and if shifted before two years, reasons are to be listed before the board.

Dubey said that there is still confusion on whether MP has a functioning Civil Services Board which is headed by chief secretary and has two senior IAS officers as members. He said that in reply to RTI application by him, the GoI responded that it did not have any information on constitution of the board in MP.

“Overall, the MP government continues with arbitrary policy of transferring IAS officers by violating the law. We demand the government, that claims transparency in governance, to come clean on this issue,” the activist said.