Praveen Pardeshi out: Split within bureaucracy to blame?

When the coronavirus pandemic first hit Mumbai on March 11, the then civic chief of the country’s financial capital, Praveen Pardeshi, was seen in the political

When the coronavirus pandemic first hit Mumbai on March 11, the then civic chief of the country’s financial capital, Praveen Pardeshi, was seen in the political and bureaucratic circles as the right person for the job on hand.

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A 1985-batch IAS [Indian Administrative Service] officer, Pardeshi had cut his teeth in administration as a young collector in Latur in 1993, when he oversaw the relief and rehabilitation efforts in the district, after the devastating earthquake that year.

Seen as an efficient and a politically suave bureaucrat, Pardeshi had moved to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) last year in May, after heading the chief minister’s office (CMO) for four-and-a-half years in Devendra Fadnavis’s regime. As the principal secretary, and later as the additional chief secretary in CMO, Pardeshi ran the state secretariat from his sixth-floor office, often calling the shots, rather than the incumbent chief secretary, and was even derided as the ‘second CM’ by those in the Opposition.

He was not replaced as the civic chief even after Uddhav Thackeray took over the reins of the state, breaking away from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and joining hands with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

Until Friday, when he was unceremoniously transferred smack midway from tackling the pandemic, Pardeshi had a good run in administration.

While one year is a short time to assess his performance as the BMC chief, he seemed to have done reasonably well. As the city civic chief, he had focussed on completing ongoing infra projects, rationalising expenditure, taking up environment-friendly measures such as planning urban forests, incentivising BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport) revamp and exploring more tourist venues for the entertainment-starved Mumbai. His 2020 budget included even a rather ambitious and lofty notion of a happiness index for the citizenry.

And at the beginning of the pandemic, he seemed to be on a strong footing. Pardeshi took a stand to increase the number of tests and successfully did that in Mumbai (current testing stands at 7,000 per million). The city was also one of the first to start stringent contact tracing and undertake containment strategies to stop the spread of the virus.

Things however, started going awry for the former civic chief, as the as the coronavirus cases continued to rise in Mumbai, breaching the 10,000-mark this week, with the disease curve refusing to flatten. It didn’t help that he did not get along with the state’s chief secretary, Ajoy Mehta, Pardeshi’s predecessor in the BMC.

With increasing pressure from the Centre to tackle the pandemic in Mumbai better, and complaints increasing from various quarters on the ground against hospitals, testing protocols and relief work, the political leadership decided to shift out the sitting bureaucratic leadership in favour of newer leadership, said a senior bureaucrat.

Sources within the state administration blamed the ongoing cold war between Pardeshi and Mehta, as one of the central reasons for the former’s transfer orders.

“The CM was receiving complaints from various quarters about mismanagement in hospitals, testing protocols and overall confusion within the BMC ranks, as well as the apparent lack of co-ordination between the BMC and the state administration,’’ added a bureaucrat, who did not wish to be named

This week, the lack of co-ordination between the state and BMC was on display, as the state government issued a notification on extending the guidelines in Maharashtra, amended it the next day to have it over ruled in Mumbai by the BMC chief the same evening. The BMC chief also amended his notification a day later after nudged by the state.

The split within the bureaucrats in the state was evident for a while now. Earlier, a team of bureaucrats from the state, including Manisha Mhaiskar and Ashwini Bhide, were appointed as a part of the Covid-19 taskforce to the BMC.

Leader of Opposition in the legislative Council, Pravin Darekar, said, “It has been evident for the past many days that there is no co-ordination between the state government and the civic administration and this was impacting on ground response to Covid-19. We had pointed this out to the CM in the meeting on Thursday. I don’t know if the war between Mehta and Pardeshi is over but it did expose the weak chinks in the administration and governance while tackling coronavirus. Generally, there is no precedent to undertake such transfers midway during an emergency situation.’’

Thackeray, who gave a wide berth to the issue of transfer in his direct address to citizens on Thursday late evening, did indicate that he was upset over the incident at Sion Hospital this week, where patients were being treated next to a dead body.

“This kind of shoddiness and mismanagement will not be tolerated in the hospitals,’’ he said.

With Iqbal Chahal, former urban development department (UDD) secretary as the new civic chief, Mehta, it is said, has got his man to helm the BMC. With both, former Thane commissioner Sanjeev Jaiswal and former Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC) chief Ashwini Bhide, seen as competent bureaucrats, appointed as additional commissioners in BMC, Mehta hopes to bring in better co-ordination between the state and the civic body.

Whether, this can in any way flatten the Covid-19 curve in Mumbai, is yet to be seen.