Government should do away with the need for vigilance clearance for secretaries who are appointed to statutory and constitutional posts within six months of their retirement, the Prime Minister's Office had been told by a former incumbent in the post of the Chief Information Commissioner.
Satyananda Mishra, who is presently chairman of the Multi Commodity Exchange, had made the recommendation before his retirement as Chief Information Commissioner.
Mishra had argued that appointments to crucial posts had been held back over the requirement for vigilance clearance.
"In recent years, one keeps hearing of numerous cases in which appointment of an existing director of a PSU or a bank as CMD has been held up for long periods ... Only because the vigilance clearance is not received in time and because numerous complaints, often engineered by rivals, keep pouring in as soon as the proposal is mooted for such appointments," Mishra had written to Pulok Chatterjee, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister.
In the letter, the contents of which have been made public under the RTI Act by Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra, Mishra has said that the problem had assumed serious proportions and was impacting the filling up of vacancies in key positions.
Until a few years back, no such clearance was required for filling up statutory positions, especially if the person concerned was serving as a secretary to the Government of India at the time of appointment or a few months prior to that, the letter says.
"The assumption was that if somebody was fit to be secretary to the Government of India, he would not need any further clearance from CVC for appointment to a Statutory/ Constitutional office," the letter adds.
Mishra had suggested that the government may go back to the old practice of appointing serving senior officers like secretaries or those who had just retired from service to the various statutory and constitutional positions without seeking any prior vigilance clearance from the CVC.
