New secretary selection causes seniority tangle

The government is set to ruffle senior level officials in the Planning Commission with the likely appointment of Jawed Usmani, a 1978-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) as the panel's new secretary. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 11, 2012, 23:53:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government is set to ruffle senior level officials in the Planning Commission with the likely appointment of Jawed Usmani, a 1978-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) as the panel's new secretary.

Usmani, who has worked as joint secretary in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) before joining the World Bank, is said to be the choice of panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

He was the junior-most IAS officers among the panel of IAS officers suggested to Ahluwalia, which included telecom secretary R Chandrasekhar. But his stint in the PMO, where he dealt with plan panel issues and in the World Bank, is said to have worked in his favour.

He is an Uttar Pradesh cadre official like principal secretary to PM Pulak Chatterjee, who replaced TKA Nair a few months ago. Usmani is among the 36 IAS officers recently empanelled for appointment as secretaries in the government of India. Others include Ram Sewak Sharma, director-general of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and Arvind Mayaram, a Rajasthan cadre IAS officer.

Usmani's likely appointment in the plan panel has upset senior secretary level officials working as principal advisors.

"We will have to report to an official at least four years junior to us," an official, who completed his tenure as secretary in a government ministry a year ago, said.

What has disappointed the plan panel bureaucracy is that the government did not consider posting any of the secretary level officials working in the commission as the panel's secretary. Instead, Usmani's appointment would mean his first secretary posting in the body which decides plan budget of all central government ministries and state governments.

"Normally, a senior secretary level official is appointed as plan panel secretary," an official said. There are at least three secretary level officials working in the commission. "It is better to take voluntary retirement than face such humiliation," he said.

Usmani, if appointed, would replace member secretary Sudha Pillai, whose tenure ends on March 31.

Pillai and Ahluwalia did not had best of working relation with the former pointing out several discrepancies in working of UIDAI, a project dear to Ahluwalia. She had also questioned working of Ahluwalia's advisor Gajendra Haldia. The appointment of new secretary is expected to end the bureaucratic tussle in the panel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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