KATHMANDU: Rajendra Pandey, a member of the House of Representatives’ State Affairs and Good Governance Committee, has raised serious concerns over the alleged manipulation of the federal civil service bill—specifically its “cooling-off period” provision—suggesting that top bureaucrats including the Chief Secretary may have played a covert role.
Speaking during Wednesday’s meeting of the parliamentary committee, Pandey, a leader of the CPN (Unified Socialist), claimed there are growing suspicions that Chief Secretary Ek Narayan Aryal and several other senior secretaries acted behind the scenes to dilute or remove the cooling-off period clause in the bill.
“We are beginning to feel that the Chief Secretary and other secretaries may have operated from behind the curtain,” said Pandey. “It was publicly reported that these officials threatened to resign if the cooling-off period was not scrapped. Perhaps they realized they couldn’t directly change it and so worked from below to undermine it.”
The “cooling-off period” is a legal provision meant to prevent immediate appointment of bureaucrats to politically sensitive positions after their retirement.
Pandey called for the formation of a parliamentary investigation committee to probe the alleged tampering and determine whether undue influence was exerted by high-level bureaucrats to weaken the legislation.
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