New Delhi: Until 2021, 1994-batch IAS officer Praveen Prakash was at the centre of all decision-making in Andhra Pradesh as principal secretary to then chief minister Jagan Mohan Reddy. As secretary of the General Administration Department (GAD), in addition to being in the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), civil servants believed Prakash wielded power unlike any other officer in the state.
Four years down the line, the impression cost Prakash his career in the Indian Administrative Service.
In 2024, as the government in Andhra Pradesh changed, Prakash found himself without a posting as CM N. Chandrababu Naidu kept 15 officers without one, he told ThePrint.
“I found that deeply humiliating because, as an IAS officer if you are kept without a posting, you have no purpose,” he said. “I couldn’t come to the Centre because the same impression was prevalent there too—that I am too close to Jagan Mohan Reddy, and I enjoyed too much power as his principal secretary. So, after 21 days, I applied for VRS (voluntary retirement from service), and was granted it.”
However, days later, amid pressure from his family to go back to the service, Prakash decided to avail the option to withdraw his plea for VRS within 90 days—an application that he alleges was met with threats of “severe consequences”.
“When whispers of my desire to come back into service reached the CMO, I was told that I will face severe consequences if I return,” he said. “I was told that I being allowed to leave the service was the least punishment I will get.”
But Prakash said he does not quite understand what he is being punished for. His case and how his career was “destroyed” is, according to him, reflective of the larger problem of politicisation of the Indian bureaucracy.
“My complaint from both Jagan Mohan Reddy and Chandrababu Naidu is that they think we are employees of the YSRCP or TDP,” he said. “As IAS officers, we work for them for as long as they are chief ministers. We don’t have anything to do with them as party presidents or leaders…they see us as party workers of the opposing camp.”
Reddy leads the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) and Naidu the Telugu Desam Party (TDP).
IAS officers, by definition, Prakash said, are risk-averse individuals. “As a risk-averse person, I would never take the risk of aligning myself with one CM when I know that, especially in the southern states, governments change every five years,” he told ThePrint.
Once a celebrity IAS officer, Prakash has now moved back to his home state, Uttar Pradesh. He lives in Noida and is working in the ed-tech company Physics Wallah as their chief adviser.
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‘Was denied central deputation’
Prakash was appointed principal secretary to Reddy in 2019 after a two-year stint as Andhra Pradesh’s resident commissioner in New Delhi.
“Being the resident commissioner of southern states in Delhi is like being the ambassador of a country,” he said. “When the CM comes, you are his go-to person for everything,” he added, explaining his camaraderie with Naidu when he was the CM previously (2014-2019).
“Even when he was opposing the PM and when he was doing meetings in Delhi, I was his go-to person,” he said. “He told me on 23 May, 2019, that he is going to come back to power, and he would want me to head the CMO.”
However, while Naidu lost the election, Prakash did manage to head Reddy’s CMO.
“Initially, I had to battle this perception by Jagan Mohan Reddy also that I was too close to Naidu,” he said. “He told me that I had crossed all Lakshman-rekhas (lines), and worked like a TDP employee, and not a civil servant.”
“It took some convincing on my part that I was only a government employee, and after that, there was an instant understanding between us,” Prakash said.
While he was believed to wield enormous power as principal secretary, Prakash said he nevertheless told Reddy in 2021 that he wanted to move to another assignment. “I had served in the CMO for over two years, and felt there were diminishing returns in terms of what I could offer in that post,” he explained. “I also wanted my juniors to get that experience.”
While initially Reddy was reluctant to let him go—saying that nowadays, posts of principal secretary to the PM and CM are coterminous—finally, he agreed. In 2021, Prakash became secretary of school education.
During this time, he was also denied central deputation by central government authorities due to the opaque 360-degree evaluation, he told ThePrint.
“I had worked as joint secretary in urban affairs and handled Swacch Bharat mission earlier. As JS, my ACR (annual confidential report) was a perfect 10,” he said. “But just because I served as principal secretary to Jagan Mohan Reddy, I was denied central deputation.”
“I told the authorities repeatedly that I could work as joint secretary at the Centre even though my batchmates were working as additional secretaries, just to demonstrate my desire to work, but I was not granted central deputation,” he added.
“The difference between PCS (Provincial Civil Service) officer and an All India Service (AIS) officer is that if the latter is facing trouble in the state, they can come to the Centre, but all the doors were shut for me,” he said. “So, if I have a grievance against the state leadership, I also have a grievance against the Centre—they didn’t stand for an AIS officer.”
The 2019 controversy when Prakash allegedly shunted out then Andhra chief secretary L.V. Subrahmanyam, an officer of the 1983 batch, after the latter issued a show-cause notice to him over an alleged procedural lapse, played a role in convincing the establishment in Delhi that he had too much of an air about himself, he said.
However, it is an allegation that Prakash has denied over the years. “I was only executing the instructions of the CM. I was not the source of the decision,” he asserted.
“The impression that we work for politicians has cost me dearly,” he reiterated, arguing that as a graduate of IIT Kanpur, he could have had an extremely successful career in the field of technology.
It is a tendency shared by both Reddy and Naidu, he said. “Even Jagan Mohan Reddy shunted out several officers when he came to power, and Naidu did the same,” he added. “This makes the lives of IAS, IPS (Indian Police Service) officers very difficult.”
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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