File photo of former AIIMS Chief Vigilance Officer Sanjiv Chaturvedi.
The Central Administrative Tribunal -- the body that settles disputes regarding the appointment and transfer of bureaucrats -- has quashed a cabinet committee's order regarding former Chief Vigilance Officer of AIIMS, Sanjiv Chaturvedi.
The order of the Appointment Committee, headed by the Prime Minister, has been sharply criticised. The tribunal said it was "against the principles of natural justice" and was not justified.
The bureaucrat had come into news after being shunted out of the post of the Chief Vigilance Commissioner at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences after the Narendra Modi government came to power. There had been speculation that he had been victimised for detecting several scams at the premier institute.
The case before the tribunal concerned Mr Chaturvedi's application for a transfer of his home cadre from Haryana to Uttarakhand on grounds of extreme hardship.
The application was made in 2012, in which he said he had been transferred a dozen times in five years, suspended, faced penalties and departmental chargesheets.
Some of these had been on the basis of false cases filed by the police and vigilance departments, and it had gone into his annual confidential report, he had said.
The application had been accepted by the governments of both states and the environment ministry -- his parent department -- in July 2014 and the next month, it was placed before the cabinet committee.
But in January 2015, the committee asked him to re-apply. The committee claimed it was necessary in view of a change in government in Haryana and the new government needed to review the application.
This had not been the usual practice, sources told NDTV. In earlier cases, the committee had given its clearance without reconsideration from the states.
Quoting from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's poem "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high," the tribunal's order said, "We do hope and trust that a situation never arise where honesty is punished and corruption rewarded."
The Tribunal has also suggested that Mr Chaturvedi's transfer plea be settled within the next two months.