The petitioner was asked by the Bombay High Court on Thursday to justify the maintainability of the claim that the appointment of the current Municipal Commissioner of the Mira Bhayander Municipal Corporation (MBMC) was unconstitutional.
According to the argument made by public activist Selvaraj Shanmugam, current Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who was the Minister of the Urban Development Department in 2021, appointed Dilip Dhole to the position of Commissioner of the MBMC after removing the previous Commissioner, who belonged to the IAS cadre.
The complaint was that the current commissioner was an officer in the IAS cadre. A challenge to an administrative service appointment should be brought before the Maharashtra State or Central Administrative Tribunal, Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Madhav Jamdar’s bench questioned the petitioner on how the High Court could get involved in this matter.
On October 10, the Court set the subject for further hearing.
These allegations were presented in the plea:
The Dhole in question is not an IAS;
The position was held by an officer from the IAS cadre, and he was removed before his term was up.
The current commissioner, who was a Deputy Commissioner in the Goods and Service Tax Department, was transferred to the State Ministry of Urban Development Department in August 2020 and then appointed as an Additional Municipal Commissioner to MBMC.
He was appointed Municipal Commissioner in March 2021. According to the petitioner, letters were sent to Cabinet Minister Shinde, and the nomination of Dhole was a political ploy to meet the demands of the current administration.
The petitioner alleged that despite the position being empty, Shinde had ordered the appointment of Dhole as Commissioner based on documents received through the Right to Information Act (RTI Act) and newspaper articles.
