Officers seek postings out of UP, netas 'harass' them

Addl DGP seeks Central deputation, goes on leave

Akhilesh Yadav, soon after he took over as the youngest chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, had assured IAS and IPS officers of ‘protection and encouragement’. But in the short 18 months of his tenure, many of them have chosen to migrate from the state to ‘more professional climes’.

With Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Arun Kumar proceeding on leave from Friday, after writing to be relieved for Central deputation, the state government has been yet again been pushed into a corner.

In the past too, many officers have chosen to go out of the state, either on long study leave or have pushed their cases for central deputation.

Arun Kumar, an upright officer who has served as a joint director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), was elevated to the top post but apparently found his hands tied in acting against criminals.

Helpless

The officer has off and on aired his helplessness, so to say, a senior cop noted, while pointing out that the state government, “for now is blinded in the pursuit of votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and has lost all sense of accountability towards officers, in favour of party cadres and supporters”.

Senior IAS officials Amrit Abhijaat, Parthasarthy Sen Sharma and a few others are off to foreign shores for year-long studies while insiders say many senior IPS and IAS officers have decided to go on deputation to New Delhi.

This is largely owing to the “failing system and growing interference of the ruling Samajwadi Party cadres in the state’s functioning,” one officer said.

Good officers like Avanish Awasthi, who was shunted from one post to another in the past two years, chose a joint secretary’s post at the Centre rather than being a ‘ping pong ball’, a senior bureaucrat pointed out.

With more than 5,000 transfers in less than a year and growing instances of Samajwadi Party leaders intervening in day-to-day affairs, an officer said “working was becoming extremely difficult.”

“In such a situation, where the SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav says from a public platform that officers should listen to party workers else action would be taken leaves us with little chance of independent functioning,” a senior officer said.

Close aides of Akhilesh Yadav maintain that he “hardly interferes in the daily functioning of officers” but admit that the ‘party leaders do’.

Shakti case

A senior IAS officer pointed out the case of suspended bureaucrat Durga Shakti Nagpal was an instance of SP leaders saying: “Do as we wish or perish.”

The Chief Minister, he added, had shown enough promise to allow freedom to work but things somehow did not work out the way he wanted due to interference from senior party leaders.

Actions like this, an officer said, were hurting the morale of the bureaucracy.