"Keval" Goa CS will head Delhi Admin: Kejrwal
GOANEWS DESK, PANAJI | 02 March 2015 21:19 IST
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal appears to be eyeing for Goa’s chief secretaries to head his administration, almost twice in a row.
Keval Sharma, who was appointed Goa’s chief secretary hardly two months ago, is expected to be shifted back to Delhi, to serve new AAP government headed by Kejriwal.
This is the second time Kejriwal is taking Goa’s chief secretary as Delhi chief secretary.
During his last term, Kejriwal had appointed Goa’s former CS S K Srivastav, after he was shifted back to Delhi, in December 2013.
However, Kejriwal has this time demanded a bureaucrat, who had taken over in Goa on 1 January.
Kejriwal has apparently asked the union home ministry to ‘give him’ Sharma as the chief secretary, if not Ashok Negi.
The national media today predicted that Sharma would be shifted as the Delhi CS.
The Union Home Ministry and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal have reportedly agreed for this appointment.
Kejriwal agreed Sharma’s name after his first choice, R S Negi, for the top bureaucratic post of Delhi was rejected by the Home Ministry.
The Home ministry rejected Kejriwal’s recommendation to appoint Negi, saying he is too junior and does not fall in the prescribed pay band of Rs 80,000 per month for the post.
“I would request you that if you cannot appoint Negi as the Delhi Chief Secretary, then please make Goa’s Chief Secretary K K Sharma as the Delhi’s Chief Secretary. I am hoping you will agree this time with us surely,” Kejriwal wrote in a letter to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday.
A senior Union Home Ministry official said,” Delhi Chief Minister Kejriwal suggested the name of K K Sharma, who is in the Rs 80000 pay band scale. Accordingly the Ministry will positively consider the same on Monday.”
Sharma, a 1983-batch IAS officer, was last posted in Delhi as the Principal PWD Secretary from 2009 to 2011 and he will supersede five officers of his cadre if he is appointed as the Delhi Chief Secretary.
Besides serving the governments of Delhi, Goa, Chandigarh, Lakshadweep, and Arunachal Pradesh, Sharma was civil affairs officer, United Nations Mission in Kosovo from 1999 to 2005.
