HC proceedings on backdoor appointments PIL watched keenly by VS employees
Thursday, 12 September 2024 | PNS | DEHRADUN
Hundreds of employees of Uttarakhand Vidhan Sabha are watching the proceedings of public interest litigation (PIL) on backdoor appointments in Vidhan Sabha secretariat with keen interest. On Tuesday the Uttarakhand High Court bench of Chief Justice Ritu Bahari and Justice Alok Kumar Verma directed the Uttarakhand government to submit its reply in a period of three weeks on appointments made in the Vidhan Sabha. Congress leader Abhinav Thapar has filed the PIL in the HC.
The next hearing on the case will be on October 15. Thapar has demanded in the PIL that an inquiry headed by a sitting judge of the HC should be ordered in the appointments made in the Vidhan Sabha from 2000 to 2022 along with recovery of the public money spent on salaries and expenses should be recovered.
The order of the HC on the PIL assumes significance since the Vidhan Sabha speaker Ritu Bhushan Khanduri, acting on the recommendation of a committee, had cancelled the appointment of 228 ad hoc employees recruited in the years 2016, 2020 and 2021 on September 23, 2022.
In an affidavit filed by the speaker in court, the Vidhan Sabha secretariat had mentioned that a similar process was adopted in all recruitment of employees from the year 2000 to 2021. Thapar said that it is now clear that irregularities in appointments in the Vidhan Sabha were going on since the creation of the State in the year 2000.
