Write Comment     |     E-Mail To a Friend     |     Facebook     |     Twitter     |     Print

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has a tough task on hand to select a suitable officer to occupy the chief secretary’s post with senior-most bureaucrat L V Nagarajan stepping out of the race.

Nagarajan, an IAS officer of the 1979 batch, was considered for the post, which will fall vacant after incumbent S V Ranganath retires in a couple of months. On Friday, Nagarajan was appointed chairman of Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development Corporation. He was not keen on becoming the chief secretary due to personal reasons, it is said. He was the finance secretary before the transfer.

Other officers on the seniority list for the post are Kaushik Mukherjee, Aravind Jadhav, V P Baligar, Anup K Poojari, Upendra Tripathi, V Umesh and K Ratnaprabha. While some officers are not keen on occupying the post, the government is not ready to settle for certain officers either because of their close proximity to the previous BJP government or because of their professional background.

Speaking of his government’s achievement recently, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had said Karnataka was facing a severe shortage of senior bureaucrats who could take up responsible jobs. He is said to have petitioned the Union Public Service Commission and the Centre to provide a few senior IAS officers to take the posts of retired officers and those retiring in the next two years.

Besides the shortage, the chief minister is also under pressure from some of his Cabinet colleagues and party senior leaders to go for en masse transfer of officers, including both IAS and KAS, as they were appointed by the previous BJP government. But the chief minister, it is said, is against taking up a large-scale transfers as that would serve no purpose.

Even after the transfer season has ended, ministers have still been allowing transfer of senior officers in their respective departments. Siddaramaiah had directed that transfers in a department should not exceed six per cent of the total staff. But even this norm has been flouted, sources said.