Chandigarh: On the last Monday in August this year, 14 school buses were stuck on flooded Gurugram roads for up to six hours. Small children sat inside as water rose around the wheels. Their parents waited at home, unable to reach them. The waterlogging receded most parts of the city only by Wednesday morning.
Weeks later, the officers who run Gurugram’s civic bodies have been removed. The Haryana government Tuesday reshuffled 14 IAS and HCS (Haryana Civil Service) officers, and three of the changes impact the city’s top administrative set-up.
Under the order, signed by Chief Secretary Anurag Rastogi, Phool Chand Meena (IAS, 2004) has been moved out as CEO of the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) and the Faridabad Metropolitan Development Authority. He becomes Commissioner and Secretary of the Human Resources and General Administration departments.
Dusmanta Kumar Behera (IAS, 2007), who held those two departments, takes over as CEO of both authorities Meena vacates.
At the GMDA, Mohd Imran Raza (IAS, 2015) is the new Additional CEO. He was Director, Human Resources, and Special Secretary in the Human Resources and General Administration departments. He replaces Vishwajeet Chaudhary (IAS, 2021), who has been relieved of the charge.
At the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG), Commissioner Pradeep Dahiya (IAS, 2013) has been moved. He becomes Managing Director of the Haryana State Federation of Cooperative Sugar Mills and Director, State Audit. Pankaj (IAS, 2020), who was the Commissioner of the Panipat Municipal Corporation, takes charge as MCG Commissioner and District Municipal Commissioner, Gurugram. Ankita Chaudhary (IAS, 2019), Additional Commissioner of the MCG, goes to Panipat to replace Pankaj.
This is not the first time Dahiya has been shifted this year. In the middle of the monsoon, he was posted as Deputy Commissioner, Rohtak. The order was cancelled within a day, and he stayed on at the MCG.
The order does not give reasons for the reshuffle. But it comes in the wake of the blame game that followed the waterlogging.
On 8 September, Union Minister of State Rao Inderjit Singh, the Gurugram MP, wrote to Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini. He asked for a vigilance probe into the waterlogging. He said hundreds of notices had been issued to builders for encroaching on natural drains, but not one encroachment was removed. He added that no money had been spent on cleaning drains in seven years.
The letter named Shiv Singh Rawat, a retired Irrigation and Water Resources department engineer. It said senior officers had told the minister t a 2 September meeting in Gurugram that the officer remained in Gurugram for several years before he retired as a superintending engineer but he kept sitting over notices given to encroachers of drains “through corruption”.
Rawat had written an opinion piece in The Tribune on 2 September (published the same day as the meeting), titled ‘Gurugram’s rain problem is really a planning problem’.
Rawat, who retired nearly four years ago as Superintending Engineer in the department’s construction wing, told ThePrint that maintenance and enforcement of the Canal Act lay with the Water Services wing. Drainage in the city, he added, had always been handled by the civic and development agencies, from HUDA and HSVP to the MCG and the GMDA. He said some officers had misled the minister to save themselves.
A senior Haryana government officer told ThePrint Wednesday that the transfers were a routine process and nothing should be read into them.