The Supreme Court has provided relief to anti-graft crusader and bureaucrat Sanjiv Chaturvedi, who had received “zero” under all heads in an annual confidential report after alleging corruption at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences where he worked.
The apex court ruled on Friday that the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) chairperson, sitting on a single bench, lacked the powers to overrule a decision by a two-member division bench of the tribunal that had stayed the adverse entries in Chaturvedi’s ACR.
It dismissed AIIMS’s appeal against an Uttarakhand High Court verdict that had quashed the CAT chairperson’s order, and fined the medical institute a sum of Rs 25,000.
Chaturvedi, who won the Magsaysay Award in 2015 for his long battle against corruption, had received the adverse ACR entries the same year and had challenged them before a CAT division bench in Nainital.
On a plea from the medical institute, the Delhi CAT chairperson had overruled the interim stay granted by the Nainital bench on the adverse ACR findings and stayed the proceedings there. When the high court quashed the chairperson’s ruling, the institute appealed in the apex court.
“The chairman of CAT does not have power under Section 25 (CAT Act) to pass any interim order of stay of proceedings pending before a bench of the tribunal,” the bench of Justices R. Banumathi and Indira Banerjee said.
“Judicial decorum and propriety demands that a judicial order, ad interim, interim or final, be vacated, varied, modified, recalled or reviewed by a bench of coordinate strength or larger strength or a higher forum, but not a smaller bench of lesser strength, except in cases where such authority to a lower forum and/ or smaller bench is expressly conferred or implicit in the order sought to be vacated, varied, modified, recalled or reviewed.”
It added: “The chairman, like the chief justice of the higher courts or the chief judge of subordinate courts, may be higher in order of protocol and may have additional administrative duties and responsibilities. However, the chairman, acting judicially, is equal to any other member. The chairman, being one among equals, could not have stayed proceedings pending before a larger bench.”
Chaturvedi, a 2002-batch Indian Forest service officer from the Uttarakhand cadre, was posted as a deputy secretary to head the vigilance wing of AIIMS from June 29, 2012, till June 28, 2016.
He says his annual performance appraisal reports for 2012-13 and 2013-14 were graded “outstanding”, with the following remarks by the then Union health minister: “Shri Sanjiv Chaturvedi, deputy secretary and CVO, AIIMS, New Delhi, is a man of integrity, sincerity, who is keen on performing his assigned role to the best of his ability and knowledge without fear or favour.”
In 2015 he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for “his exemplary integrity, courage and tenacity in uncompromisingly exposing and painstakingly investigating corruption in public office, and his resolute crafting of program and system improvements to ensure that”.
He says he donated the award money of Rs 14.23 lakh to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund after AIIMS declined to accept his donation towards the free treatment of underprivileged patients.
Chaturvedi alleges that in August 2014, AIIMS withdrew his powers as central vigilance officer after he had unearthed corruption in its infrastructure projects.
Through an order dated January 11, 2017, the institute communicated an adverse annual confidential report for the year 2015-2016 to Chaturvedi, uniformly giving him zero under all heads. He was subsequently repatriated to his parent forest department in Uttarakhand.
Chaturvedi had earned the “whistleblower” tag for uncovering several scams while he was posted in Haryana.
