Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Aug 2: State Government has declined to consider the induction of Secretaries of the High Court Judges into Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service (KAS) on the ground that the move would be against the principle of independence of judiciary and separation of judiciary from executive.
The issue came to the fore in a petition titled Tarsem Kumar Arora and Others Versus State of Jammu and Kashmir and Others seeking induction of Secretaries of the High Court Judges into KAS.
The stand taken in the petition was that petitioners’ category has already been treated at par with their counterparts attached with the Ministers and the matter already stands decided by the Apex Court of the country. It was also submitted by the petitioners before the High Court that counterparts of the petitioners’ category have been given benefit of induction into KAS and subsequent high grades in terms of SRO-368 of 2008. However, this benefit was denied to the petitioners’ category.
In the petition, the High Court vide order dated July 18, 2014 issued certain directions to the Department of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs.
In the compliance report submitted to the High Court, the copy of which is available with EXCELSIOR, the Law Department has mentioned, “since the petitioners are seeking treating of their services as one of the feeding services for induction into KAS, the matter was referred to the General Administration Department for views and comments”.
Vide its letter GAD (L) F-150/2014/632 dated July 24, 2014, the General Administration Department conveyed to the Law Department that application of the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service Rules, 2008 to the staff of the High Court and inclusion of the officers of the High Court as feeding service to KAS would not be a workable proposition.
On inclusion of a service in the list of feeding service to KAS, all posts carrying the pay scale of Rs 15600-39100 with grade pay of Rs 6600 and above will become part of KAS cadre and the officers irrespective of the feeding category to which they originally belong, will be posted against these posts, the GAD said.
“By doing so the KAS cadre officer and the staff of the High Court would become inter-transferable which means that against the posts of Secretaries attached with Judges as also the Joint Registrars, any KAS officer will be posted. Similarly, the petitioners including others borne on the cadre of Secretaries and Joint Registrars will be posted against any of the KAS cadre posts”, the GAD said.
Moreover, by doing so the entire administrative control of the High Court services will shift to the Government and this would be against the principle of independence of judiciary and separation of judiciary from executive thus offending Section 108 of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution.
“So far as the representation of the personal staff of the High Court is concerned, a separate scheme can be formulated by the High Court in the shape of Recruitment Rules so as to provide better chances of promotion to the personal staff of the High Court on the pattern and similar to the avenues available to the State Government officers under Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Services Rules”, the compliance report said.
The Law Department has conveyed to the High Court that soon after the receipt of views of the General Administration Department, Registrar General of High Court was requested to formulate draft scheme for the personal staff of the High Court in order to better their promotion avenues and send the same to the Law Department for the consideration of the Government.
“As and when a proposal is received from the Registrar General, the same would be placed before the Government in consultation with Finance and General Administration Department”, the compliance report said.
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