Punjab recalls panel for UT Finance Secretary’s post

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 20

The Punjab Government has recalled the panel it had sent for the post of the UT Finance Secretary 10 days ago.

Notably, the previous SAD-BJP government had sent the panel a day before the result of the Assembly Elections was announced. It was the second panel the state government sent to the UT Administration after its first panel was rejected. The UT Administration returned the first panel as it did not meet the requirements and parameters set by the Ministry of the Home Affair for senior level posts.

While the MHA stressed the need to fill the senior posts from directly recruited IAS officers, the old panel included names of promoted officers only. Names of Vikas Partap Rahul Tiwari and Anurag Verma were included in the second panel.

The government retained Vikas Partap in the second panel while it replaced the two officers from the earlier one. Three officers, whose names were sent to the Administration earlier include Vikas Partap, Gurkirat Kripal Singh and Arvinder Singh Bains.

The post of the Finance Secretary has been lying vacant after the tenure of Sarbjit Singh ended two months ago. With the new development, it is expected that the decision on the new Finance Secretary will be delayed further.

Posts of SSPs vacant too

The two key posts of the SSP (UT) and the SSP (Traffic) in the UT police have been lying vacant since the past few months with officiating charges being given to two officers.

The UT administration is yet to receive names of the officers from state governments.

While the post of the SSP (Traffic) is lying vacant since April 2016 after Maneesh Chaudhary was repatriated to Haryana, the post of the SSP (UT) is lying vacant since December 11, 2016, after Sukhchain Singh Gill, a 2003-batch IPS officer, was repatriated to Punjab.

Eish Singhal, a 2010-AGMUT cadre IPS officer, is at present officiating as the SSP (UT), while Ravi Kumar, a 2012-batch IPS officer, is officiating as the SSP (Traffic). UT DGP TS Luthra could not be contacted for comments in this regard.

A police official said with no regular officer to look after key posts, official works suffer a lot.

The post of the UT DIG was also lying vacant since November 2, 2016.