Chief Secretary Manoj Parida has been transferred and posted to Delhi by the Union Home Ministry.
Ashwani Kumar, now serving the government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi as the PWD Principal Secretary, is the new Chief Secretary for Puducherry according to orders posted on the website of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, which is the cadre controlling authority of officers of the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories) joint cadre.
The MHA has directed that the officers be relieved with immediate effect.
Mr. Parida, who hails from Odisha and is an officer of the 1986 batch of the AGMUT, had assumed charge in June 2015. Much of his over two-year tenure coincided with a period of intense power tussle between Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi and Congress Chief Minister V. Narayanasamy.
As the ties between the Raj Nivas and the government plunged new depths, the bureaucracy was caught in the crossfire of the power struggle. “It is impossible to work and deliver results in an atmosphere vitiated by this constant feuding....and with all sorts of allegations flying thick and fast, it was getting risky for any honest officer to work without tainting his career and reputation” Mr. Parida told The Hindu .
Though the Lt. Governor had been vocal in her criticism of the Chief Secretary for what she saw as his failure to remain “neutral and professional” as she told the newspaper in an interview in June, Mr. Parida’s defence has been that he has played by the rules and that this had been borne out on occasions when complaints were escalated to the MHA.
‘No external pressure’
Ruling out any external pressure behind his transfer, Mr. Parida said he had already put in a transfer request after he was promoted to the rank of Additional Secretary in 2016. “The average tenure of a Chief Secretary has been about two years while my term has been six months above that,” he said.
He counted as some of the highlights of his tenure the resumption of flights from Puducherry, securing the French assistance for the Smart City bid, the beach restoration project and the port development getting back on the rails. “My only regret was not being able to deliver more because of the deterioration in work culture when two top Constitutional heads are locked in confrontation,” Mr. Parida said.
Know UT’s new Chief Secretary
The Union Territory’s new Chief Secretary Ashwani Kumar who hails from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh serves as Principal Secretary, PWD in Delhi.
The AGMUT (1992) officer holds a Masters in International Development, Economics and International Development, and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering, IIT Roorkee.
In other MHA orders relating to the UT, A. Anbarasu (AGMUT/1996), who has served as Private Secretary to Mr. Narayanasamy when he was Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office in the UPA-II Government while G. Narendra Kumar (AGMUT/1989) was also transferred from Delhi to Puducherry.
