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Andhra Pradesh chief secretary PK Mohanty has requested the Election Commission to spare the All India Services officers working in the state from the election duty as they are required for the ongoing bifurcation exercise.
"The Election Commission had asked the state to send 100 officers for posting them on the election monitoring duty in various states. However, the chief secretary is keen to keep every officer engaged in the ongoing exercise as the administration has to complete the whole work before June 2. But it is for the Election Commission to decide," a senior official told Business Standard on Wednesday.
According to the official, the CS has already conveyed his request to the Election Commission in Delhi. If it is not possible to keep all the officers back in the state, the effort would be to send very few officers from Andhra Pradesh on the election duty, he said. The election process and the process for the bifurcation of AP have to be completed almost at the same time.
The chief secretary today asked the panels constituted last week to complete the exercise on the division of assets, liabilities, employees and contracts by March 30 so as to enable the central committees and then the Government of India to finanalise the scheme well ahead of the appointed date of the state bifurcation. In all, 15 sub-committees are working on different aspects of the bifurcation.
A central committee, constituted to look into the division of the employees between the two states, is expected to hold its first meeting with the state authorities on Thursday (March 6). The division of employees is going to be a difficult process as the authorities have to deal with the contentious issue of violation of local, non-local formula along with the facility of option given for the state-level cadre to work in either of the two governments.
The chief secretary has already instructed the finance department not to give March salaries to those who had not submitted documents to establish their local, non-local status. The authorities have to divide about 84,000 state-level government posts between Telangana and residual AP in the 42:58 ratio proportion to the population of the respective states.
Against these posts, only 56,000 officers are currently working. Of these, 52,000 personnel had submitted their local or non-local status, according to the officials. The rest of the 750,000 government staff will remain in their respective districts post bifurcation.
Two states from June 2
A separate consolidated fund for each of the two states, two sets of all the government departments grouped under two separate roofs will be put in place by June 1 midnight to enable the governments of the two states to start working from June 2. The finances proposed in the vote-on-account Budget will be split between the two states based on the population. The new governments will have three more months to present their own budgets as the present Assembly has approved the vote-on-account Budget for a period of six months.
New chief secretaries and new directors general of police (DGP) of the two states will be appointed by the Centre before the new governments are constituted, according to the authorities.
