Much-transferred IAS officer appointed to closed PSU

An IAS officer in Karnataka, who had been transferred six times in the last six months, has now been made the Managing Director of a public sector undertaking (PSU) that has been closed for more than three years now.

Principal Secretary Grade IAS officer M N Vijaykumar, who is now posted to an office covered with a thick carpet of dust, claims he is being hounded for exposing corruption in high places.

Just what is his brief in a closed company? “I don’t know. I asked the Chief Secretary in writing about my brief. He has not replied”, Vijaykumar told reporters.

During his previous posting as the Bangalore Regional Commissioner, Vijaykumar had made Government files accessible to public scrutiny. Two days before the launch of the public inspection of the files, Vijaykumar was transferred out. His tenure as Bangalore Regional Commissioner lasted barely 20 days.

But, he remains unrepentant. “Just give me one week with the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR), I will expose at least 20 corrupt officers with disproportionate assets worth more than Rs 200 million each”, Vijaykumar claims to have told the Chief Secretary.

Apart from honesty and integrity, Vijaykumar even has a passion for Information Technology (IT). Almost a decade ago, he had developed a voice-recognition software that converted Kannada speech to text and demonstrated it at the Computer Society of India, Bangalore, in 1998. “I was approached by multinational companies to sell it to them. But, I declined as it would have led to unemployment of typists”, Vijaykumar said.

Even as Vijaykumar is bearing the ordeal with clenched teeth, his wife J N Jayashree has taken up the cause of her husband through a weblog http://fightcorruption.freespaces.com. As for Vijaykumar, he is reportedly planning to approach the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) for justice at an appropriate time.