Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The state government has sent a proposal to the union ministry of personnel, public grievances and pensions for termination of Santosh Kumar Verma from service and withdrawal of the IAS award given to him.
To note, Verma was removed as deputy secretary, agriculture and shifted to the general administration department (GAD) pool in the wake of his controversial remark against Brahmin girls.
GAD has written a letter to the secretary, ministry of personnel, public grievances and pensions, drawing his attention towards the government receiving various memorandums from different social organisations, employee unions and elected representatives against Verma. In these memorandums, a demand has been raised that Verma should be terminated from the Indian Administrative Services.
Along with this, GAD has also written about the case in which Verma is accused of forging court order to show his acquittal in a criminal case and getting promoted to IAS from State Administrative Services (SAS).
The letter explained that his name was included among those under consideration for promotion from SAS to IAS cadre in 2019. At that time, a criminal case was pending against him but his integrity could not be proved. In the selection committee meeting held on September 10, 2020, his name was included as a probationer.
On October 8, 2020, he presented an alleged court order to show his acquittal in the case. The government tried to appeal by writing a letter to ADG Indore Zone. However, the IG Office, Indore presented the view of the district prosecution officer saying that the acquittal order seems to be genuine and the case was not fit for appeal. On this basis, he was promoted to IAS cadre on December 11, 2020.
In the meantime, one Harshita Agrawal, who had earlier complained against him, spilled the beans about how Verma managed to get promotion to the IAS rank by forging the government documents and giving wrong information to the government regarding his pending case.
When the government tried to scrutinize the matter, it surfaced that no acquittal order was passed on October 6, 2020 and the case was still under consideration. Later, he was arrested in 2021. Afterwards, he managed to get bail from the Supreme Court in 2022. As he remained in police custody for 48 hours, he was suspended on July 13, 2021. A charge-sheet was also issued to him and his reply was found unsatisfactory, forcing the government to go for a departmental inquiry against him which is underway.
