Continuing its clean-up drive against corrupt and indisciplined bureaucrats, the Modi government has forced three IPS officers to retire as they were found “unsuitable for the job”. Amitabh Thakur (1993 batch Inspector General), Rajesh Krishna (2002 batch DIG) and Rakesh Shankar (2005 batch SP) were removed by the Ministry of Home Affairs on the request of the Uttar Pradesh government.
“On the basis of the MHA’s order, the state government issued letters to Amitabh Thakur, Rajesh Krishna and Rakesh Shankar informing them about their premature retirement,” said Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Awanish Kumar Awasthi.
Of the three, Thakur is an IPS officer while Krishna and Shankar were promoted to the rank from the Provincial Police Service. The three were removed probably due to different reasons. While Thakur is known for not following the government orders and had many complaints against him during the previous governments too, Krishna and Shakar had corruption charges against them.
Krishna came into the limelight when big police recruitment took place during his stint as Additional Superintendent of Police in Azamgarh in 2006, while Shanker’s was in news for having a role in the Deoria shelter home sex scandal in 2018.
Following the footsteps of the Modi government, the Yogi government has shown the exit door to corrupt and non-performing officials at regular intervals. Previously, while reviewing the work done by the Secretariat Administration Department, he stated that there was no place for corrupt practices in his government. “There is no place for corrupt officials and staff in the government… Action must be taken against such officials by forcing them to take voluntary retirement.”
Moreover, many IRS officials, IPS officials and the people in the secretariat department were warned that they will be shown exit door if their performance is not up to the standard and any charges of corruption or complacency found to be true.
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UP Chief Minister also enquired about the status of implementation of e-office and asked the officials to speed up the process. E-Office is a ‘product suit’ developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that helps in faster clearance of files and envisions a paperless office. Successful implementation of e-office will further aid the anti-corruption agenda of the Yogi Adityanath government, as it addresses the traditional slippages in government offices that have plagued the Indian executive for a long. Such slippages lead to corrupt and underperforming IPS and IRS officials.
E-office also pushes to make the government ‘paperless’ by promoting the execution of administrative tasks over Information technology infrastructure. Yogi Adityanath also pushed for the ‘e-office’ to be taken at the district levels and use to preserve important documents of the secretariat.
We can certainly see a paradigm shift in the bureaucratic system in the Narendra Modi government. The recent words and actions of PM Modi speak a lot. “Babuon ke haath mein desh de karke hum kya karne wale hai? (What are we going to achieve by handing the grip of the nation to the bureaucrats?),” were the exact words of PM Modi on the floors to Lok Sabha, making a sense of transformation in the governance visible. And, the state government and the union government are on the same page on this.