HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad bench of Central Administrative Tribunal on Thursday asked the central government to explain its stand on a petition filed by Kurnool joint collector Ch Harikiran who charged the authorities with messing up the rules that resulted in his allocation to the Telangana IAS cadre.
The bench, comprising B Venkateswara Rao (member, judicial) and Ranjana Chowdary (member, administration) was dealing with an application filed by Harikiran, a 2009- batch officer who stood as one of the IAS toppers of that year and got into IAS as a general candidate by not using his SC status either at the time of examination or at subsequent levels.
As for the cadre allocation, he said that he had initially been allotted to AP state but in the subsequent developments was sent to Telangana state cadre allegedly in a unilateral way.
His counsel N Ashwani Kumar submitted that the authorities had used his SC status to shift him out of AP though he never used it. First he was shown as SC from AP in the initial division list but later, under the pretext of excess SCs, was sent to Telangana. The theory of excess SCs was wrong as there were only eight SC IAS officers as against the sanctioned strength of eight, he pointed out.
The counsel further said that the authorities had reduced the SC officer strength to seven and shown Harikiran as eighth and excess one in order to suit their interests.
The officer would have got allotted to AP if he was shown as a general candidate, he contended. The bench posted the matter to Wednesday for further hearing, including the version of the Centre, on the issue.