66 IAS officers transferred in UP

Sixty-six Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers were transferred late Saturday in Uttar Pradesh, in a major shake up of the state bureaucracy, a state government spokesman said.

The rejig included the transfer of five principal secretaries and several district magistrates. Secretary (Home) Amrit Abhijat was moved out and given the charge of tourism as its director general.

Sanjiv Saran was divested of his charge as Lucknow commissioner and director general tourism but retains the charge of principal secretary infrastructure and industrial development commissioner.

Kumar Kamlesh is the new divisional commissioner of Lucknow.

The district magistrates of Bahraich, Fatehpur, Banda, Deoria, Lalitpur, Mau, Jhansi, Auraiyya, Meerut, Sitapur, Rae Bareli, Hardoi, Amroha and Kanpur Dehat are prominent in the transfer list.

Former director of information and public relations, Prabhat Mittal who was transferred recently and put on a waiting list, also figures in the new postings. He was named the new secretary for information technology and electronics.

Mittal, who held the post of the public relations wing head for most of Akhilesh Yadav's regime, is said to have incurred the wrath of the chief minister for failing to publicise the image of the state government.

The rejig was on the cards ever since the Samajwadi Party lost the parliamentary elections and its numbers fell from 22 in the 15th Lok Sabha to just five in the current Lok Sabha.

By the transfers, a senior official told IANS, the top leadership of the ruling party "was trying to set things right".

Most party leaders, legislators and workers had blamed the bureaucracy for the humiliating defeat of the party in the Lok Sabha polls.