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By Pankaj Vohra

The Centre through a presidential Ordinance has extended the tenures of the directors of Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation from two years to five years, a move that is going to have wide ranging ramifications for the civil services to begin with.

The immediate fallout of this extension which would benefit the current ED Boss, S.K.Mishra, whose extended term was coming to an end this weekend, would be that there would be pressure mounted on the government to widen the net of this five year provision.

The powerful IAS lobby would want that even the tenures of the Cabinet Secretary, the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the Finance Secretary and the Foreign Secretary should also be similarly increased at par with the latest ordinance.

This would also automatically entail extensions to even the Director of the Intelligence Bureau and the Secretary, Research and Analysis Wing besides a demand for similar benefits for Central police organisations and State police chiefs. There would virtually be no end to this and the entire administration could witness confusion which has never been seen before.

The repercussions would be there in the civil services where the Human Resources issue would be impacted thereby affecting seniority matters.

It is always the desire of every bureaucrat to head the organization where he or she has had a long innings. However, if this five-year tenure gets introduced, the ambition of many aspiring and competent officers would never be fulfilled with there being no vacancy at the top.

The Supreme Court had once described the CBI as “a caged parrot’’ and it would be not difficult to imagine that the premier investigating agency may become both “caged and aged’’.

The CBI has in the past had directors who served for more than four to five years and such luminaries include the likes of F.U. Arul, D.Sen, D.P.Kohli and Mohan Ganesh Katre.

The IB also has had some distinguished directors including the eminent B.N.Mullick, who served as the boss of the agency from 1949 to 1964 as also M.K.Narayanan, who had an interrupted five year tenure from 1987 to 1992, with R.P.Joshi occupying the position for a few months during Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s dispensation.

Even in the bureaucracy, there have been examples where the officer occupied the position for a considerably long period. L.P.Singh, one of the country’s highly regarded ICS officers, served as the Home Secretary for nearly seven years.

The matter concerning the ED director is a bit tricky since the ED comes under the Finance Ministry and the director reports directly to the Finance Secretary. The anomaly would arise when the FS would be appointed for two years and the ED director for five years.

This extension overall as applied to the civil services would also mean that for some chosen ones, who are considered close to the political dispensation, the retirement age could go up to 65 years instead of the present 60 years.

Another dimension of this Ordinance is that even the armed forces may want that the three service chiefs should also be appointed for five-year terms. In case of General Bipin Rawat, who is now the Chief of Defence Staff, his term in the exalted position of a General has already been there for nearly five years and could go even further.

The government of the day must have certainly applied its mind while getting the Ordinance promulgated.

Nevertheless, it would have been better, had there been wider consultations with the Members of Parliament, senior bureaucrats and the judiciary.

The decision may face a judicial challenge with many in the bureaucracy describing it as hare-brained proposal. In the end, it is the elected government that is supreme and it is unlikely to relent in the immediate future.

(Courtesy – The Daily Guardian, issue dated 15th November 2021. Pankaj Vohra is Managing Editor of TDG)