A 1988-batch IAS officer of Haryana cadre, Mr. TVSN Prasad, has been appointed to look over the matter of grievances exchanged between senior IAS officer Ashok Khemka, 1991 batch, and his colleague, Sanjeev Verma, an IAS officer of 2004 batch.

Mr. Prasad will investigate the whole matter and submit a report. The Manohar Lal Khattar led Haryana government has designated him to conduct an in-depth inquiry into this matter, which recently has been in the news.

Mr. Prasad, serving as the Financial Commissioner of Revenue with an additional charge of Additional Chief Secretary, Home, will scrutinize a multitude of complaints submitted by both officers to the state government.

Mr. Prasad hails from East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh, and earlier served as the state’s Finance and Treasury Secretary for around five years. With several publications to his credit, he is currently in a doctoral program in economics in the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and served as a Lead Economist at the World Bank.

He has a Masters from Harvard University, has an Edward S. Mason Fellow in Public Policy and Management and is a John Kenneth Galbraith Scholar in Infrastructure Economics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

As an IAS officer, he has held numerous positions, such as Deputy Commissioner, Rohtak and Kurukshetra, founding Chairman and Managing Director, Andhra Pradesh Central Power Distribution Company, Chief Administrator, Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board, and Principal Secretary, Department of Food, Civil Supplies, and Consumer Affairs, Government of Haryana.

During his stint in the Central Government between 2014 and 2018, Mr. Prasad served as Mission Director in the National Mission for Clean Ganga and Joint Secretary (later as Additional Secretary) in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

He worked in the Government of India as Mission Director of National Mission of Clean Ganga, and later as Joint/Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

THE CASE

The two IAS officers have been at loggerheads with each other since April 2022. It all started when Mr. Verma as the then managing director of Haryana State Warehousing Corporation (HSWC) submitted a complaint to the police for registration of a first information report (FIR) against his senior IAS colleague, Ashok Khemka and three others for allegedly making appointments in HSWC in an illegal and arbitrary manner.

In response, ACS rank Ashok Khemka lodged an FIR against Sanjeev Verma, accusing him of making
false charges and framing an inaccurate document with the intent to cause harm.

Both FIRs were filed on April 26, 2022, invoking provisions of the Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act. However, the FIRs remain dormant due to the police’s failure to fulfill the statutory requirement of obtaining prior approval under section 17-A of the PC Act before registering an FIR.

Since then, a series of complaints and counter-complaints have been filed by the two civil servants.