Bhopal: It’s almost a year since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Mohan Yadav took over as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, but he’s still struggling to find his rhythm with the state bureaucracy.
In the past 11 months since being sworn in, Yadav’s government has issued a transfer order every four days and reshuffled nearly 80 percent of the IAS officers in the state, which some officials say has disrupted continuity in policy making.
Data from the Government of Madhya Pradesh’s general administration department shows that 261 officers have been transferred so far, with the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) being rejigged twice already and officers who held key portfolios under former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan being among the first to be moved out.
This transfer spree comes at a time when the state is already grappling with a shortage of officers. Despite its sanctioned strength of 459 IAS officers, only 384 are allocated to the Madhya Pradesh cadre and, of these, only 330 are effectively working in the state as 54 officers are away on deputation elsewhere.
“The transfers that we have seen in the past one year are unprecedented and severely impact the functioning of officers. After Shivraj Singh Chouhan was newly appointed as the CM back in 2006, he observed more restraint before issuing transfer orders,” retired IAS officer Warad Murti Mishra told ThePrint.
“In fact, he made it a point to get a group of effective officers and his chief secretary within two months of becoming the chief minister, which greatly helped him handle the bureaucracy of the state and did not require such frequent rejigging.”
After Mohan Yadav took over, one of his most significant decisions was appointing senior IAS officer Veera Rana as full-time chief secretary. She had been given the additional charge of chief secretary ahead of the state assembly election.
Another key decision by Mohan Yadav’s newly formed government involved appointing five new deputy secretaries to the CMO and removing officers who held key portfolios under his predecessor, Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
Senior government officials say the frequent transfers have led to a lack of continuity with many officers unsure of their tenure and hesitant to make decisions.
“There are many departments that need a sense of continuity, but with these transfers, there is no continuity or methodology of achieving a set of goals,” said a senior state government officer.
Yadav has a reputation for being a bold decision-maker who doesn’t linger on issues, but officials said the constant rejigging has led to a great deal of confusion and delays in policy-making.
“On many occasions, a proposal is moved to the cabinet by one officer, but by the time the proposal is cleared by the cabinet and returned, the principal secretary of the department has been changed,” said another officer.
“In certain departments, like the Revenue Board where both sides are to be heard before passing an order, the hearing takes place but the officer is transferred before an order is passed,” the officer added.
ThePrint reached the commissioner of state’s public relations department via calls. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
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Changes at the top
While the government has moved officers across levels, the most significant changes were at the top with officials holding critical positions in Shivraj Chouhan’s tenure the first to be reassigned to relatively insignificant departments.
For instance, in one of Yadav’s first orders, the commissioner of public relations, Manish Singh was reassigned as joint secretary without any department being allocated. Manish Singh had held important positions under Chouhan’s tenure, like as Indore collector.
Similarly, the principal secretary to Chouhan, Manish Rastogi, was moved to the position of principal secretary for jails while Neeraj Vashisht, who served in Chouhan’s CMO, was sent to the Free Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes Department.
In the months to follow, many officers who had been transferred were rehabilitated to important portfolios, essentially reserving the earlier orders.
Manish Singh had a brief stint as Registrar at the Consumer Disputes Redressal Commissioner before he was moved to the post of Commissioner of the Housing and Infrastructure Development Board. And Manish Rastogi was put in charge of coordination in the chief secretary’s office.
They were not the only ones to be transferred.
Sanjay Shukla, a 1994 batch officer who held charge of the public health engineering and industries department, was moved as principal secretary at Raj Bhawan soon after Mohan Yadav took over. He was later reassigned as principal secretary in the women and child development department.
Similarly, 1993 batch officer Sanjay Dubey was first made principal secretary of the home department on January 22 before he was transferred to the post of principal secretary of the science and technology department in August. He was given additional charge as principal secretary of the General Administration Department and the IT department.
After a two-month lull in April and May due to the Lok Sabha elections, the transfers resumed on 11 June with significant changes. Rajesh Rajora, a 1990-batch officer, was promoted to additional chief secretary to the chief minister, while Sanjay Shukla found a spot in the CMO.
This was followed by a detailed work distribution in the CMO. Instead of the principal secretary to the chief minister and his team of five handling various departments, Rajora was given a 15-point role after his elevation, which included coordination with the Prime Minister’s Office and other states, overseeing policy formulation and implementation, and overseeing cabinet-related work.
In the same order, principal secretary Raghuvendra Singh was given a handful of departments to oversee in the CMO.
This move was widely seen as an attempt by Mohan Yadav to groom Rajora for the chief secretary’s job. However, it also led to a dilution of an earlier order in which the CMO consisted of Raghuvendra Singh as principal secretary and five deputy secretaries.
By July 23, Aditi Garg, one of the five deputies appointed to the CMO in February, was reassigned as the collector of the Mandsaur district.
Many believed Mohan Yadav had been backing Rajesh Rajora to become the next chief secretary after Veera Rana’s retirement, but eventually Anurag Jain was appointed to the position on 30 September.
Jain’s appointment was followed by a wave of reshuffles. In the first major reshuffle after Jain took over, two key officers working in the CMO—Sanjay Shukla and Raghuvendra Singh—were reassigned to lead individual departments.
While Raghuvendra Singh was given charge of the entire industries department from large industries to MSMEs, Sanjay Shukla was tasked with handling the urban development and housing department with additional charges of three other departments.
Subsequently, in two independent transfer orders, two officers—who worked as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) and Deputy Secretary in CMO—were also moved out of the CMO.
The opposition Congress party accused Mohan Yadav’s government of running what it described as a “transfer industry”.
State Congress president Jitu Patwari told a news conference this month that many transfer postings were issued in the middle of the night and “posting of IAS/IPS does not seem possible without paying money! Brokers are in power”.
प्रदेश में अपरिपक्व मुखिया की वजह से प्रशासनिक अराजकता का माहौल व्याप्त है!
10 महीने की सरकार में 385 में से 282 अधिकारियों के तबादले हो चुके हैं, जो कुल आईएएस पोस्टिंग का 74% है। रात के अंधेरे में लिस्ट आती है जिसमें आईएएस/आईपीएस की पोस्टिंग बिना पैसे दिए संभव नजर नहीं आती है!… pic.twitter.com/gFTUOe3F7l
— MP Congress (@INCMP) November 17, 2024
The government hasn’t responded to the allegations so far.
This was not the first time that Patwari had accused Mohan Yadav’s government of transferring and posting officers for money. Earlier in September, during the Kisan Nyay Yatra, Patwari accused the Narmadapuram collector of securing the post by paying a bribe. The chief minister dismissed the allegations.
“For Mohan Yadav, who boasts of being committed to development through good governance, these frequent transfers put the spotlight on his hypocrisy and reveal where his true interest lies,” former chief minister and senior Congress leader Kamal Nath told ThePrint.
“The very essence of good governance is to have a sense of accountability, a vision that comes with stability in tenures. A chief minister who has failed to stabilise his own CMO nearly a year after being appointed the CM is merely toying with the hopes and aspirations of millions of people of the state,” he added.
But some officials defended the changes in the bureaucracy, saying some adjustment was inevitable in any transition period.
“It is always the case when there is a change in the head of the state or the chief secretary. It does take time for things to settle down,” said one officer.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)