Sex scam damns Andhra Pradesh IAS

After the EMAAR scam and the illegal assets case of Jagan Mohan Reddy, it is now the turn of a sex scandal to plague the bureaucracy in Andhra Pradesh.

The IAS community in the state has yet another scandal on its hands as V S Bhaskar, the deputy director general of Aadhaar (UIDAI-unique identification authority of India), Hyderabad region, is being hauled up for sexually harassing his junior woman officer.

The Hyderabad region covers AP, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Following the petition of S Padmaja, an IRS officer holding the rank of additional director general before the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), the Hyderabad Bench of the tribunal summarily ordered Bhaskar’s transfer and repatriation to the 1985-batch officer’s parent state of Assam and Meghalaya on February 3.

In her petition before the CAT, Padmaja had claimed that Bhaskar had been harassing her mentally and had for the past six months also tried to physically assault her.

Her petitions to several organisations and at the government level had not yielded any result. Padmaja finally approached the tribunal where again, Bhaskar tried to influence the court but failed in view of the evidence she submitted.

Bhaskar has challenged the tribunal’s order before the Andhra Pradesh High Court, saying that the IRS officer was trying to gain sympathy and advantage of her position in administration.  The High Court will hear Bhaskar’s petition on Wednesday. An electronics and communication engineering graduate, Bhaskar came to Andhra Pradesh in 2009 on deputation to head the Aadhaar regional office. As per records, his tenure will end in 2014.

In perhaps the first such case in the country, the Maharashtra government sacked a senior bureaucrat on a charge of sexual harassment recently.

Labour Welfare Commissioner Mohan Dhotre had been facing a probe since 2003 which ended with Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan giving his consent to the dismissal. The state administration served the sack order.