Chairmen of Revenue Boards - Should be a tenure Post
THE CBEC Chairman is retiring in November and the CBDT Chairman in December. The Revenue Administration should find successors before that. As per the Recruitment Rules, only a Member with more than one year residual service is eligible to be appointed as Chairman. In our last week's CobWeb, we pointed out a strange situation - in December when the CBDT Chairman retires, there is no Member in the CBDT with more than one year service left. So now the Government has to appoint a Member with more than 16 months left and within a couple of months of his appointment as Member, he will supersede all the senior Members and become the Chairman. This new Chairman who was reporting to all these senior Members till yesterday would want them to report to him – in a hierarchy conscious service, his life will be miserable. When Mrs. Gandhi superseded the Judges of the Supreme Court and appointed AN Ray as the Chief Justice of India, all the superseded judges resigned. Justice Hidayatullah then remarked, "this was an attempt of not creating 'forward looking judges' but the 'judges looking forward'.
The Revenue Boards are the most important statutory Boards in the Country responsible for collecting the Revenue (maybe for squandering by the politicians) for the Nation and are certainly as important as say the Home Secretary or the Service Chiefs and should have a fixed tenure of at least two years, so that they have the time to do something. Why can't we simply appoint the senior-most Member as Chairman and let him continue in that post for two years?. After all only Members are appointed as Chairmen and if one is good enough to be a Member, he is obviously good enough to be Chairman.
The FM should ensure that we should have 'forward looking Members' and not 'looking forward' Members.
More on this in our TIOL TOP