If he is Jammu and Kashmir cadre IPS, the present Bhojpur district magistrate, Pankaj Kumar Pal, a Manipur cadre IAS officer, was a couple of years back in the news for allegedly being involved in the killing of Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) and his two sub-ordinate staff, when he was posted as Deputy Commissioner of Ukhrul in that state.

kAs reported earlier by BiharTimes, Pal was charged with the murder of SDO Dr Thingnam Kishan and his two subordinates Y Token and A Rajen. When the Manipur government, after the preliminary inquiry, found the charges against the IAS officer true, it placed him under suspension on February 19, 2009.

Though the Manipur government further instructed Pal not to leave Imphal headquarters without the permission of the Chief Secretary he somehow managed to get the Bihar cadre. He originally comes from Uttar Pradesh. All these facts came to be known in the media after the killing of a jail doctor by prisoners in Gopalganj, in 2011 where he was the district magistrate. However, Pal hotly denied the charge of killing any official in Manipur and dubbed it as a conspiracy against the outsiders hatched in Manipur.

Another IAS officer from cadre other than Bihar, J K Sinha, had to be relieved from his post in the CM secretariat and repatriated to his parent cadre almost overnight after the government received some adverse reports about his conduct. Officially, however, his hasty repatriation was never explained. Before CM Secretariat, he had also served as the DM of Patna.

Among five IAS officials on inter-state deputation to Bihar, Pankaj K Pal, Manish K Verma and Abhijit Sinha are at present DMs of Bhojpur, Purnia and East Champaran.
Sanjay Singh, now special secretary in CM Secretariat, is also from Odisha cadre. He was till recently the DM of Patna. Before that he was the district magistrate of Gaya.

Though Sanjay is free from any controversy what is strange is that most of these officers are either from Nalanda or belong to what the leader of opposition, Abdul Bari Siddiqui, says of ‘royal blood’.

If they are not of royal blood, connections play its part in brining officers to Bihar. The state has at present 198 IAS officers against the cadre strength of 326. In all 95 posts are vacant while 30 officials are on central deputation and three on inter-state deputation.

It is to overcome this shortage that officers were brought from other states.

Not only IAS and IPS, several all-India services officials have also been posted at various posts in Bihar. For example, D K Srivastava, J K P Singh and P K Rai are Indian Railway Traffic Service officers. They are posted as director (Tourism), MD of Bihar State Text-book Corporation and CMD of Bihar State Power Holding Company Limited respectively.

Indian Post & Telecommunication Service officer Sanjeevan Sinha and Indian Accounts and Finance Service officer, Awadhesh Kumar, are MD of Bihar State Infrastructural Development Agency and MD of Bihar State Tourism Development Corporation respectively.

According to reports Bihar State Warehousing Corporation and Beltron have also one ‘imported’ official each. Five Indian Forest Service officials––M K Sharma, Satyendra, Ashutosh Kumar, P K Gupta and Arvinder Singh–– are also serving on key positions in the state.