BENGALURU: The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) on Wednesday rejected the original application (OA) of Director General of Police & Commandant General of Home Guards & Civil Defence, Fire & Emergency Services, M N Reddi, challenging the appointment of the incumbent Director General & Inspector General of Police Neelamani N Raju.
Mr Reddi, the second senior-most IPS officer in Karnataka belongs to the 1984 batch.
In his petition, he had stated that the government did not follow the Supreme Court guidelines while appointing Raju as the Head of Police Force (HoPF) in November 2017 and had not sent the list of senior-most IPS officers, who were in the zone of consideration for the top post to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC).
Raju is of the 1983 batch and is the senior-most officer in the state.
The Tribunal, while rejecting his plea, observed that the high power committee, which was constituted by the state government to appoint the DG&IGP had done an “excellent job.”
The committee had made a comparative study of all the six candidates on the list and examined their service records before placing their views before the Chief Minister, who took a “balanced stand” and appointed Raju as the DG&IGP, keeping her seniority in mind.
Reddi had also argued that the incumbent police chief had spent most of her service tenure at the Centre in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and had little experience of fieldwork.
To that, the CAT observed that Raju’s annual confidential reports were excellent.
“The appreciation letters given (to her) were for the very purpose of excellence in fieldwork. Intelligence gathering is also an effective tool of policing. Her superiors have said that all along she was doing fieldwork and her appreciation letters are in this regard,” the CAT stated.
Reddi had challenged the appointment of Ms Raju before the High Court.
On June 24 the Court had directed CAT to dispose the matter within one week as the Tribunal had earlier declined to give any interim direction during pendency of Reddi’s plea.