Over 20 months after 1986-batch Orissa cadre IPS officer M Nageswar Rao moved to the CBI as its joint director, three new officers are set to join the investigation agency in the same rank from other departments.
The three new inductees are Praveen Sinha, a 1988-batch Gujarat cadre IPS officer working as additional secretary with the Central Vigilance Commission; Ajay Bhatnagar, a 1989-batch Jharkhand cadre officer serving as an inspector general with the CRPF; and Pankaj Kumar Srivastava, a 1992-batch officer employed as an additional director general with the Madhya Pradesh police.
The cabinet’s appointments committee had cleared the appointment of six CBI joint directors on Wednesday. The other three officers promoted to the position are Sharad Aggarwal, GK Goswami and V Murugesan, who were earlier employed with the agency in the capacity of deputy inspector general.
The CBI was facing acute manpower shortage in its ranks, and that included joint directors for supervising probes and heading various zones of the agency.
Although the CBI has 18 sanctioned joint director posts, it was functioning with just nine officers at that rank. Most of them held one or two additional charges to compensate.
Despite the six new appointments, the agency will still have three less joint directors than the sanctioned strength.
The CBI had earlier mooted the names of four officers for induction as joint directors, but their names could not get final clearance. When the CBI last listed job vacancies on its website, it showed an overall shortage of around 20% in the ranks.
The CBI had flagged the issue of manpower shortage in a statement before the parliamentary standing committee for ministry of personnel in April 2016. The panel was told that despite having the capacity to probe around 700 cases every year, the agency was investigating around twice that number annually. (With Hindustan Times)
