Sunday, 18 December 2022 | PNS | DEHRADUN
Launching a diatribe on the Uttarakhand government and cabinet minister Prem Chand Agarwal, former chief minister and senior Congress leader Harish Rawat has questioned the presence of Agarwal in the cabinet. In an interview on Saturday, Rawat said that both chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and Vidhan Sabha speaker Ritu Khanduri have termed the Vidhan Sabha appointments as illegal. “If some illegal thing is done then its perpetrator is punished,’’ he said. Rawat said that in such a situation there is a question mark over the presence of Agarwal in the cabinet. He added that the statements of the CM and the speaker that appointments in Vidhan Sabha were illegal are very serious.
Rawat’s attack on cabinet minister Agarwal assumes significance in the wake of a recent decision of the Supreme Court in which it rejected the petition of the terminated employees challenging their removal from the service. On the recommendations of a committee headed by former bureaucrat DK Kotia, the Vidhan Sabha speaker had cancelled the appointments of 228 ad hoc workers on September 23 this year. These ad hoc appointments were made in the years 2016, 2020 and 2021 when Govind Singh Kunjwal (Congress) and Prem Chand Agarwal were the speakers of Vidhan Sabha. The Kotia committee in its report found that the appointments were made in gross violation of all norms. It said that no selection committee was set up for making the ad hoc appointments, no advertisement was issued, no competitive examinations were held, the names of eligible candidates were not sought from the employment exchange and no applications were invited. Since the appointments which were removed were done during the tenure of Kunjwal and Agarwal as Vidhan Sabha speakers, questions are being asked about their role and future. The pressure is more on Agarwal since he is a cabinet minister in the Pushkar Singh Dhami cabinet and has stoically defended his decision so far. Kunjwal on other hand has sought an apology for having made appointments of his family members.
