HYDERABAD: Wednesday's Telangana High Court order on cadre allocation of 13 All India Services officers is unlikely to bring the curtains down on the prolonged litigation, precisely a decade old when the state was bifurcated in 2014, unless the Centre puts the issue in cold storage as it did earlier.
As per the HC order, the officials should approach the department of personnel and training (DoPT) with a request to reconsider its previous allocation, taking into consideration certain observations made by the Central Administrative Tribunal.
The majority of officers were able to remain in the cadre of their choice thanks to the CAT orders, while a few were forced to work in a state against their choice as the same CAT orders were not implemented by the other state.
“The catch here is that Centre already gone through the CAT observations and preferred to challenge in the High Court and assailed the same observations in its petition. The stand of DoPT is clear that cadre allocation was Centre’s prerogative and courts in different cases, including the one that sent former Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar back to Andhra Pradesh, upheld it,” a senior official pointed out.
Significantly, there was no time frame set for the officers to approach the Centre and it has to be seen how the Centre would react if the officers remain to not submit their representations.
“As there was no clarity yet on whether or not the CAT order was set aside, we cannot comment on DoPT’s next course of action,” said one Central official, adding that the Centre also can suo moto write to the officials to approach it with grievance and take a decision after considering their grievance.
The officials did not rule out the possibility of the officers initiating a fresh round of litigation if the Centre turned down their request.
The DoPT had earlier washed off its hands by filing a writ petition in the Telangana High Court, challenging the CAT orders. For reasons best known to it, the DoPT did not even pursue the case when they were not even listed, let alone arguments taking place, for more than four years. Deccan Chronicle exposed the inaction of the DoPT, following which the arguments took place in the High Court, which reserved its judgment for a few months.
The HC delivered the verdict delinking Somesh Kumar’s case with others and repatriated him to his parent cadre AP. Significantly, the verdict came a few days after Somesh Kumar skipped Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s review with all the state Chief Secretaries.
“It has to be seen if DoPT will be pro-active this time or ignore like it did in the past when it did not even press for listing of the case for four years,” said one official.
