After being accused of allowing the ‘sudden, abrupt and illegal’ transfer of VAT Commissioner Vijay Kumar, Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung on Tuesday okayed the appointment of a senior IAS officer hand-picked by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to the same post.
Sajjan Singh Yadav, a 1995-batch IAS officer of the AGMUT cadre, who was posted in the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) earlier, was appointed the VAT Commissioner by Mr. Jung after he shot down the name of another bureaucrat, Ankur Garg, whose name Mr. Kejriwal had proposed, for ‘not being senior enough to be appointed as VAT Commissioner’.
Keshav Chandra, who also belongs to the 1995-batch of the UT cadre, will replace Mr. Yadav at the DJB in what a senior Delhi government official termed ‘a master-stroke which will strengthen both these crucial departments’. Mr. Chandra will also hold the additional charge of secretary, tourism.
“Both officers, who belong to the same batch, fulfil the eligibility criteria pointed out by the L-G and were appointed,” said the official, adding that a significant change of DANICS officers was on the cards.
“We expect less resistance from Raj Niwas in relation to the reshuffling of DANICS officers, which is in the pipeline as that has been the norm; the objective is to affect a significant change in the revenue collection model in the Capital,” the official said.
Last week, the Delhi Cabinet questioned what it termed the ‘sudden, abrupt and unexplained’ transfer of Mr. Kumar, whom the government credited with significant enforcement leading to record VAT collection, by Mr. Jung, in addition to constituting an empowered Group of Ministers to assess, and extend ‘protection’ to government officials facing ‘political victimisation’ for refusing to ‘paralyse the elected Aam Aadmi Party government’.
