HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) on Monday directed the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana governments to file their counter-affidavits within next three weeks explaining the rationale behind their decisions to appoint JV Ramudu and Anurag Sharma as DGPs of their respective states.
The bench, comprising judicial member BV Rao and administrative member Minnie Mathew, gave this direction while hearing a plea by senior IPS officers SA Huda and TP Das, who had challenged the appointment of incumbent DGPs of both the states.
The bench posed a question to AP’s counsel Posani Venkateswarlu as to how his government has made a regular DGP appointment even before completion of the final cadre allocation to the state. “Manpower allotted to you is on a provisional basis. How can you make regular appointment basing on such allotment?” the bench asked.
The counsel replied that they followed the procedure laid down by the Supreme Court duly involving the UPSC and considered all the seniors before selecting Ramudu for the top post. No prejudice was caused to Huda and Das on account of this and they would not gain anything even if the decision of the state was stayed. Moreover, the final allocation of cadre has now separated even Huda and Das as one was allotted to AP and the other to Telangana, he added.
The bench gave three weeks time to both AP and Telangana to file their counter-affidavits.