BB Vyas is Commissioner Planning, Khursheed Ganai Principal Secretary to CM !

J&K Govt’s special information for IAS officers without an RTI application

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Jan 8: General Administration Department (GAD) is officially responsible not only for maintaining service record of KAS and IAS officers but also for sharing with the public every information about these public servants. Imagine what this custodian of all such authentic information is telling the world at large through its official website www.jkgad.nic.in on January 8^th, 2011.

State government’s most authentic domain on the Internet mentions head of the GAD itself, Mohammad Sayeed Khan, as Secretary to Government, Social Welfare Department. According to it, Bharat Bhushan Vyas is Commissioner-Secretary Planning Department and Khursheed Ahmed Ganai is Principal Secretary to Honourble Chief Minister. This inspite of the fact that Khan had been appointed as Secretary GAD on August 26, 2010---the day Vyas and Ganai swapped places in a major reshuffle in the state bureaucracy.

The GAD website, being maintained by NIC, further mentions S S Sawhny as Principal Resident Commissioner in New Delhi and Gowhar Ahmed as Member J&K Special Tribunal. Mr Sawhny has actually reached superannuation on 31-12-2010 and Mr Gowhar on May 31 last year. On the GAD website, Chairman J&K Special Tribunal, Samuel Varghese, has been mentioned as Financial Commissioner Home, Principal Secretary Home B R Sharma as Principal Secretary Power Development Department, Mehboob Iqbal, who had been attached to GAD on 26-8-2010, has been described as Commissioner-Secretary R&B and Excise Commissioner G A Pir as Secretary School Education.

Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir Asgar Hassan Samoon has been designated as Commissioner-Secretary CAPD and Transport and actual head of CAPD, Pradeep Gupta, has been introduced as Excise Commissioner.

Senior bureaucrats in Chief Secretary’s office as well as GAD did not respond to phone calls but their juniors, on the condition of anonymity, told Early Times that nobody in the Civil Secretariat had bothered to update information about 100-odd IAS officers in the last 12 calendar months. The list of J&K cadre IAS officers, as available on the most authentic website of the state government, has been compiled on 18-01-2010. Interestingly, however, the list of the state’s KAS officers is well up to date.

“Khursheed Ganai Sahab, alongwith Asgar Hussain (now in CM’s Secretariat) and others, not only created the GAD domain in 2006-07 but also kept it religiously updated every day. His successor Basharat Sahab was terribly keen in other practical achievements for the services but still made it a point to keep the latest information available for the common people. Sayeed Khan Sahab is believed to have never visited this site, let alone updating it”, said a middle rung official in GAD. He was, however, quick to make it clear that the responsibility of maintaining and updating the links lay with NIC. “Yes Khan Sahab and others seeking extension in services in the department should have alerted the NIC and made it update all links”, he admitted.

“How do you except bureaucrats and officials to update information about IAS officers when both, National Conference as well as PDP, have been seeking their expulsion from the state?” asked a former Minister with a veiled reference to the two major political parties’ slogans of “Greater Autonomy” and “Self Rule”. He asserted that there was no political will to make the defunct State Accountability Commission and the non-existent State Information Commission operational in Jammu & Kashmir. “It’s ridiculous that the government found only one individual (Wajahat Habibullah) suitable to head SIC and not a single individual after Justice (R.P) Sethi’s resignation fit to head SAC in this country of 110 Crore population”, he observed, with a dig on the two-year-old NC-Congress coalition.

END