Government may introduce double shifts in Central Administrative Tribunal

CAT chairman Justice VK Bali

THE government is contemplating to have double shifts in Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) to further speed up disposal of cases, minister of state in Indian Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) V Narayanasamy said at the fourth conference of CAT in New Delhi on Sunday.

Once implemented, such a move will help speedily settle complaints and other service matters of the Central government and PSU employees. The CAT came into existence in 1985, and in the last 20 years, it has disposed 4.51 lakh cases. For the Central government employees, it’s also a less costly way to get justice.

A number of government employees may not be satisfied with the performance of the CAT but judges of India’s higher judiciary have all their praises for the CAT. Justice Dalveer Bhandari, Judge of the Supreme Court of India, said that CAT has functioned as a viable substitute to the High Courts. Former Chief Justice of India, Justice JS Verma, went one step further terming CAT as “the unsung heroes of justice delivery system in India”.

Justice VK Bali, chairman of CAT, in his address said there has been an attempt to bring down the case disposal time to six months. He said that CAT has now benches at 17 different places all over the country to provide speedy and less costly justice to the employees in service related matters.

How can you ignore AK Antony’s OSD Jacob, asks a BoI reader

KV Jacob

A reader of babusofindia (BoI) has claimed Central Secretariat Service (CSS) officer Dr KV Jacob is no less important officer than Gautam Sanyal, another CSS, who BoI has recently described as the “new poster boy of India’s babudom”. A close confidante of Mamata Banerjee, Sanyal recently hogged the limelight when he was given one year’s extension after his retirement making him probably the first retired bureaucrat to head the chief minister’s office in Kolkata.

As the BoI reader has claimed, and rightly so, Dr KV Jacob is no less powerful. In 1990s, he was additional private secretary to Antony, then a minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution. When Antony became defence minister in UPA-I, he roped in Jacob too. Jacob is now a director-ranked OSD to Union defence ministry and is an inspiration to many CSS officers in Delhi’s corridors of power. “Mr Jacob is one of the very few in civil servants to be a gold medalist in PhD in field of botany and genetics,” emailed the BoI reader.
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