The case of Arvind Kejriwal, RTI and anti-corruption campaigner, about his not being relieved from government service even five years after he quit, highlights the need to hasten the process of relieving employees after they have resigned

Recently, when Arvind Kejriwal was given a notice from the government office where he worked previously and he rebutted it with his own explanation of the facts, an interesting aspect that came to the fore was that despite having formally resigned from service in February 2006, as per government records he was still in service. Thus, because he has not been able to pay back his computer loan and because he possibly needs to pay back his salary for the two-year period when he had taken study leave as per the provisions of the Central Civil Services (Leave Rules) 1972, his resignation was still pending with the Government of India. I find it amusing, because this is a man about whom the entire world knows that he was an IRS officer who resigned from his service and is openly pursuing a lot of social causes, but the official records possibly refer to him as an officer on undeclared leave.

I must say that Mr Kejriwal's is not a solitary case of a huge delay in acceptance of resignation from service, that too in such superior services like the IAS and IPS. I have two IPS friends from Uttar Pradesh, Dawa Sherpa, who is now a senior leader in Gorkhaland often involved in the agitation on issues related to Gorkhaland, and Kiran Jadhav, who is now in the corporate world. Both of them resigned three to four years back, but their resignation applications are still pending and they are, theoretically, still in service. Thus, while in the IPS civil list Mr Sherpa is listed as "absent from 20/08/2008", Mr Jadhav's status is simply "DIG absent".

An even more interesting case is that of Sanjay Pandey. Before working in the same service, we studied together at IIT Kanpur. Mr Pandey is a BTech in Computer Sciences from IIT Kanpur, which I would think is one of the most coveted achievements for a student in India. Like many others idealists, he also drifted to the Civil Services in 1986. Later, he probably he did not relish the job to the extent that he had wished he would and he resigned from service in 2000.

He wanted to join the private sector, but according to his version, "since they had not accepted my resignation for long, it was causing me problems in the kind of jobs I did in the private sector. Since they did not accept the resignation, I withdrew it in August 2001. Later I heard they had accepted the resignation." It possibly became a matter of principle for Mr Pandey and there were a slew of court cases. Today, Mr Pandey manages his own IT firm, although the website of the Maharashtra Police reads: Shri Sanjay Pandey, w.e.f. 18/06/07 (SP Level) - I. P.S. Officer Under Compulsory Waiting.

Now, as far as the rules are concerned, rule 16(2) of the All India Services (Death-Cum-Retirement Benefits) Rules, 1958, states that a member of the service may, after giving at least three months previous notice in writing to the state government concerned, retire from service on the date on which such member completes 30 years of qualifying service or attains 50 years of age, or on any date thereafter to be specified in the notice. In addition, there is also Rule 16(2A) of the above rules for those cases in which a member of the service has completed only 20 years of qualifying service, where again, he may after giving three months previous notice in writing to the state government, retire from service. The only latch here is that this notice of retirement shall require acceptance by the central government as well. There is also an office memorandum of the Government of India dated the 16 October 1978 which says that under the Service Rules, retirement of a member of the service becomes effective on the expiry of three months' notice given by him, unless he is under suspension.

Though at the same time, in the guidelines for acceptance of notice of voluntary retirement, dated 16 October 1980, it is also written, "In cases where disciplinary proceedings are pending or contemplated against a member of the Service for the imposition of a major penalty, and the disciplinary authority having regard to the circumstances of the case is of the view that the imposition of the major penalty of removal or dismissal from service would be warranted, the notice of voluntary retirement given by the officer concerned may not ordinarily be accepted." I think it is possibly this clause that often comes in the way of acceptance of the voluntary resignation application of many IAS and IPS officers, though this may not always be the reason.

Presumably there are other examples as well where there is no disciplinary inquiry pending against the officer and yet his case remains pending for years. Even in those cases in which the disciplinary inquiry is pending, I hold the view that once an officer has presented his case for voluntary retirement and has thus already made a move not to serve the government anymore, it only befits the concerned government that, based purely on the merits of the case, his/her disciplinary inquiry gets decided as quickly as possible.

This is important because, often, in the name of such pending inquiries, the application of voluntary resignation is kept pending for years, making a mockery of the entire procedure. It is because of this that we find an ex-IPS officer participates in the agitation in the hill lands of Darjeeling and is yet listed as "an SP absent from the job" on the services records, and another former officer who runs an IT firm is called "SP on compulsory waiting".

This is one more area in which we require swift decision-making by the government to rid ourselves of such an unsavoury situation, where a Mr Kejriwal says: "If the government feels that I am still in service, would it mean that I shall come and join the service so as to ask for voluntary retirement the next year when I should have theoretically completed 20 years in service?"

(Amitabh Thakur is an IPS officer from the Uttar Pradesh cadre and president of the National RTI Forum.)