The IAS officer had no reason to go to the media

Rane, however, dismissed the linking of Bhatia’s transfer from divisional commissionerate to the Pune Municipal Corporation with the controversial letter while describing the transfer as a routine exercise and a prerogative of the government himself released the confidential correspondence to the members of the fourth estate, he was unceremoniously shifted to Pune Municipal Corporation. Bhatia, an IAS official of the 1967 batch, has been replaced by Rajiv Agarwal, of the 1975 batch as the Pune Divisional Commissioner.

The new posting of Bhatia has been considered as demotion in the state bureaucracy, particularly when the alliance government was considering to shift him to the Mumbai Municipal Corporation in place of Girish Gokhale.Though top bureaucrats have welcomed government’s decision to shift Bhatia for indiscipline, however, they feel that the questions raised by him should be answered either by Chief Minister Narayan Rane or Chief Secretary P Subrahmaniyam. “Bhatia has raised the main issue of corruption and the failure of the alliance government to take action against the erring officials. It will be highly improper if we ignore the issues raised by him,” the official pointed out.

In his series of confidential letters of P Subrahmaniyam, Bhatia has directly levelled charges of negligence and casual approach against the Chief Secretary. “I feel that government should give top priority for removal of corruption in the administration. The General Administration Department should give specific guidelines for the purpose instead of concentrating on computerisation programmes,” Bhatia pointed out in his letter to the Chief Secretary.

Bhatia had alleged that the Chief Secretary was neglecting major issues, particularly relating to economic development of the Pune region and in the process, the alliance government is losing its credibility in the eyes of the public, particularly the Project Affected Persons.

Bhatia had brought to the notice of the Chief Secretary that owing to the failure of the government to rehabilitate project affected persons, they were creating hurdles in the completion of on-going irrigation projects in the Pune region and secondly, he had requested Subrahmaniyam to take stern action against erring talathis and other revenue officials in the Pune revenue division.

On one hand, as a commissioner of the Pune Revenue Division, Bhatia had given a written undertaking that the project-affected persons will be rehabilitated in a time-bound period and on the other hand, there was absolutely no response to from the government. As a result, the PAPs directly blamed Bhatia for his failure to rehabilitate them.

On the Rs 10,000 crore Krishna Valley irrigation projects, Bhatia had submitted nine awards for acquisition of 2000 hectares of land in July 1998 and had asked for Rs 20 crore towards compensation. In the absence of adequate financial assistance, while the department was unable to acquire the land, at the same time, owing to lethargy on the part of the Mantralaya officials, the alliance government was not in a position to impound the water alloted to it under the Krishna Water Tribunal Award.

Following a specific complaint made by anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare, Bhatia had conducted an inquiry and recommended to Irrigation Minister Eknath Khadse to suspend 54 officials including a dozen Executive Engineers for rampant corruption and irregularities.

However, Khadse transferred all the officials on the day Bhatia submitted the report.

Even Khadse was also unhappy with the style of functioning of Bhatia, since he first released his report to the media and then submitted it to him.