The government is facing another major trouble over high-level appointments, after Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) set aside yesterday the selection of T C A Anant as Chief Statistician of India (CSI) in June last year.
While the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MOSPI) remained abuzz with the talks of implication of the CAT order on Friday, Anant called up cabinet secretary Ajit Kumar Seth, seeking advice. He was subsequently told to wait for further government direction.
Anant, earlier a professor of economics at the Delhi School of Economics, declined to comment on the CAT’s order.
The government, he said, had appointed him. “I will act according to the government’s advice,” is all he would say. Anant continued with his normal work as the ministry officials gave final touches to the preparations for tomorrow’s meeting of the National Development Council.
A senior MOSPI official said the government was seeking legal opinion and would formulate its strategy to handle the issue. “The order can be challenged at a higher level,” told Business Standard. “In this case, it will be the high court — within 60 days.
For the government, this is the second such instance associated with the appointments to the critical posts. Earlier this year, it faced major embarrassment over having appointed P J Thomas as the central vigilance commissioner. The UPA regime had to subsequently remove the IAS officer, allegedly linked to corruption in a case of palmolein import by the government in his native Kerala in 1992. He was removed from the post after the Supreme Court quashed his appointment on March 3. As in Anant’s case, the CAT’s principal bench yesterday set aside his appointment as CSI.
The grounds for this, according to the jurists Meera Chhibber and A K Mishra, was that the appointment was not made “in accordance with the eligibility criteria prescribed by the government”.
Anant was selected to the past by a search-cum-selection committee headed by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia for a five-year term. Besides Ahluwalia, Deputy Governor of RBI Subir Gokarn and S P Mukherjee of the Central Statistical Association were the members of the search-cum-selection committee. Anant had been selected from a pool of 19 candidates.
Central Statistical Office director S K Das, an officer of Indian Statistical Service (ISS), challenged the appointment on the grounds that Anant was not a statistician but an economist — and therefore not eligible for the post. CAT, in its ruling, said it found the short-listing of candidates had not been made on any reasonable criterion.
“The argument that Prof Anant was a distinguished economist and in that capacity satisfied the condition of having statistical and managerial experience in a large statistical organisation does not hold water. It is not only in economics but in almost a large number of disciplines where data are analysed through a process of inductive logic that statistical tools are employed, but that does not make professionals of those disciplines eligible for the post of CSI”.
CAT has now directed the search committee to reconsider the matter keeping in view the eligibility criteria prescribed by the Government as well as in the notice inviting applications and give their recommendations afresh within a period of eight weeks.
Pronab Sen, who served as first CSI after creation of the post in 2007, however, said that the fact of the matter was that even in his case the kind of experience in handling statistics work was being talked about, was not there.
Sen said that as far as Anant was concerned, he was the leading econometrician in the country and his experience in handling statistics and managerial work was second to none.
A senior official from the statistical department, who didn’t want to be quoted, said that the case has not been handled properly by the law ministry.
Even Rangarajan, who was appointed as the chairman of the National Statistical Commission was not a statistician in the strict sense, he said.
Officials said even the late Dr Suresh Tendulkar, who headed the national statistical commission and dealt extensively with official data and numbers, would not be considered a statistician in this context.
