SP govt issued 2,454 transfer orders

Indian Police Service (IPS) officers in Uttar Pradesh were shuffled quite frequently during the five-year Samajwadi Party regime.

The SP government, which came to power in 2012, issued 2,454 transfer orders of the 407 IPS officers from March 2012 to March 2017 in the state, according to information furnished by IG (personnel) PC Meena on a Right to Information (RTI) query by activist Nutan Thakur.

The information revealed that 78 IPS officers were transferred on 10 or more occasions during this five-year period. Of them, Umesh Kumar Srivastava got transferred maximum (20) number of times. Likewise, Anees Ahmad Ansari was shunted 18, Rajendra Prasad Pandey 17 and Dilip Kumar was shifted 16 times. Five IPS officers, including recently suspended Himanshu Kumar, were transferred 15 times.

The data revealed that at least 215 IPS officers were transferred five or more times during this five-year period. Among the least transferred officers were Sanjay Tarde, who was shifted once to CB-CID, and remained there all through and Kamal Saxena, who was moved once to the home department. According to the RTI reply, among the IPS officers suspended during this period, IG Amitabh Thakur was kept suspended for a maximum of 10 months while most others got reinstated within a few days or 2-3 months. By this information, an IPS officer in Uttar Pradesh is transferred 27.3 times during his career.

Among them, IG Pramod Kumar Mishra has been transferred 55 times in his entire career of 33 years while IG Vijay Kumar Garg has been shifted 52 times, DIG Umesh Kumar Srivastava and IG R K Swarnkar 51 times and Gopal Lal Meena 50 times. There are 50 IPS officers in UP cadre who got transferred 40 or more times in their career. According to Nutan Thakur, these mass-scale transfers during SP regime meant that an average of 1.3 IPS officers were shifted each day for the five-year period, while it also meant that on an average an IPS officer got transferred six times.