By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 1 Jun: Uttarakhand Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) Chief Karan Mahara today strongly opposed the government move to grant extension of service to some senior officers in an “arbitrary” manner. In a statement issued today, Mahara claimed that it appears that the entire state government is running on a contractual basis. Mahara said that by repeatedly giving extensions to retiring officials from crucial posts like Chief Secretary of the state, Chief of PWD, Chief Engineer of Irrigation Department, Director General of Uttarakhand Jal Vidyut Nigam, MD of Uttarakhand Power Corporation, MD in charge of PTCUL, Jal Nigam, and making interim appointments on posts like Director General of Police, many capable and eligible officers are not getting due chance to serve on these posts.
Mahara claimed that the government is certainly hurting the interests of the talents of Uttarakhand. He insisted that after someone’s retirement, new officers should be given a chance to highlight their talent/capability. By not doing this, the government is certainly discouraging talented officers on one hand and on the other hand, by giving extensions, it is tending to protect corrupt officials, the PCC Chief claimed. Mahara said that the government has made them a target of extortion by giving extensions to the crucial posts of government institutions. He said that by giving extensions repeatedly to officers, the government is doing injustice to talented officers. This, he claimed is not a good indicator of a clean and transparent administration.
Mahara said that it seems that the state government is giving such arbitrary extensions on important posts in various departments at the behest of the Centre. This has caused a lot of anger among junior officers, because their authority is being constantly attacked. This, he claimed is absolutely wrong. He alleged that the officers getting repeated extensions indicates their clout and level of influence in the government. He said that the Chief Minister should take cognisance of such cases and immediately stop this trend so that the affected officers can get justice and the arbitrariness of the officers can also be stopped.
