2 weeks Ago By Manasi Phadke
Mumbai: An IAS officer’s top ambition often is to become the chief secretary, head of the government’s administrative unit in the state where they are posted, before retiring. Praveen Pardeshi, a 1985-batch officer in Maharashtra, retired in 2021 without ever having attained the coveted position. He has, however, managed to emerge stronger post retirement than some of his contemporaries—even those who held the position of chief secretary.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis last week appointed Pardeshi as his chief economic adviser—a position created especially for him—and one that will remain in place as long as the incumbent chief minister serves. The retired civil servant will have the status of a minister of state. Pardeshi is also the chief executive of the state government’s think tank MITRA, chairman of the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee, and on Thursday, he was also appointed the co-chairperson of the state data policy’s apex governing committee.
He will share this role with Maharashtra Chief Secretary Sujata Saunik. Pardeshi was among Fadnavis’s most trusted officers, even during his first stint as the chief minister (2014-2019). Back then, he served as principal secretary in the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO).
The General Administration Department (GAD) Saturday published a detailed government resolution, clearly listing down all of Pardeshi’s duties in his new role as chief economic adviser. Also Read: Chennai’s ‘metro man’ to one of Modi’s most trusted, TV Somanathan is more economist than generalist State government officials maintain that his duties are distinct, and will not curb the authority of any other person in the administrative set-up. “There will be no division within existing duties and responsibilities.
Pardeshi won’t even be part of the CMO. He will be like personal staff to the CM, so there shouldn’t be any major friction,” said a senior officer. However, as a retired civil servant, who now has the status of a minister of state, Pardeshi wields substantial power in the state administration.
Moreover, his job description involves duties that could potentially interfere with the authority of Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar in a coalition government that has seen multiple instances of internal friction within the first five months of coming to power. These duties include giving quarterly reviews of the state’s financial condition to the cabinet, being present at cabinet meetings to give perspective on proposals for policy decisions by the finance department, scrutinising proposals related to economic changes, industrial and agricultural policies when asked by the chief minister, and so on. Opposition leaders wonder if this is Fadnavis’s ploy to sideline Ajit Pawar, who holds the finance portfolio.
His nephew, Rohit Pawar, who is part of the rival Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party, said that the deputy chief minister’s territory was being “encroached upon”. A former IAS officer said that everyone in the Mantralaya (state secretariat) has to operate in line with the duties and responsibilities listed out in the rules of business, which say nothing about advisers. “These kinds of advisers become like the personal staff of the CM.
The adviser can study a few things, some reports here and there, highlight a few points and give inputs. The CM then will have the whole thing examined by the formal administrative system and apply his own political logic. If this process is followed and the adviser remains confined to his role, there is no friction in the administration,” the ex-officer said.
“If the adviser starts issuing his own guidelines and directives without proper authorisation, he may step on people’s toes. So, it completely depends on whether he stays confined to being part of the CM’s staff without interfering in the larger administrative flow.” However, what queers the pitch a tad bit is that the rules of business also do not have any description for the role of a deputy chief minister.
According to the rules of business, deputy chief ministers are considered ministers as far as the roles and responsibilities go. Leaders from Ajit Pawar’s NCP have not commented on Pardeshi’s appointment. But the deputy chief minister himself cleared the air Wednesday.
“We are all trying to bring fiscal discipline to the government. Devendra Fadnavis saheb is trying, Eknath Shinde saheb is trying. If some experienced people who have contacts in the World Bank, with whose help the state can get more funds.
.. What’s wrong with that? The state will only benefit from it.
My personal opinion is that the CM took an appropriate decision by making the appointment,” he said. Pardeshi did not respond to ThePrint’s calls and text messages for a comment. When Pardeshi was principal secretary to Fadnavis, he enjoyed considerable clout in the administration.
The visitors’ lobby outside his sixth floor office almost always had queues of people seeking the CMO’s intervention in various issues. Back in 2016, Narayan Rane—now a BJP MP—was a member of legislative council from Congress, and had once launched a scathing attack on the government in the Vidhan Parishad, saying that Fadnavis was only one of three CMs in the state, calling Pardeshi the second one, and leaving the third unnamed. Such was Pardeshi’s influence as the right-hand man of Fadnavis, who had put the officer in charge of overseeing everything important to him—for instance, the war room to fast-track infrastructure projects.
Fadnavis chaired the war room meetings, while Pardeshi and Kaustubh Dhavse, the chief minister’s Officer on Special Duty, minutely monitored the projects and follow up with officials from different departments to ensure that the work was done. Pardeshi would also accompany Fadnavis on all his foreign visits, one of which had landed the chief minister in a controversy. In 2015, he was traveling to the United States with a few officers, including Pardeshi, who had reportedly forgotten to carry his new passport that had the visa stamped on it.
The Opposition had then alleged that Fadnavis had delayed the Air India flight for his principal secretary—a charge that he had firmly denied, threatening to file a criminal defamation suit against anyone making such claims. In March 2019, when Mumbai civic body chief Ajoy Mehta was appointed as chief secretary, Pardeshi, then an additional chief secretary, was sent to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in his place. That was the year when the protests to save trees from being hacked at Mumbai’s Aarey Colony had turned vociferous.
Fadnavis was pushing for the car shed for the underground Colaba-Bandra-Seepz metro corridor to be built at Aarey, while the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ally, the then undivided Shiv Sena under Uddhav Thackeray, was strongly opposed to the proposal, siding with activists and environmentalists protesting to save the trees and move the shed to another location. Amid the back-and-forth of files and approvals, it helped Fadnavis to have an advocate of his cause at the helm of the Mumbai civic body. In October that year, immediately after the Bombay High Court upheld the BMC tree authority’s decision to allow tree felling at Aarey, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC) began clearing them out in the dead of the night.
“Pardeshi has generally been known to get things done fast, often aggressively. The entire Aarey saga is one such example,” a senior IAS officer said. Also Read: Once Mayawati, Akhilesh & Yogi’s top-performing IAS officer, now under ED radar—Who is Abhishek Prakash In November 2019, the locus of power shifted.
Fadnavis became the Opposition leader, and gradually, Pardeshi’s high-flying career also took a turn. The COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and there was often friction between Pardeshi and then chief secretary Ajoy Mehta, sources in the bureaucratic circles say. For instance, Mehta had, in May 2020, issued a notification allowing stand-alone shops and liquor shops in Maharashtra to be opened everywhere, except in containment zones.
The shops then saw long queues with people throwing all social distancing protocol to the wind. Within two days, Pardeshi suspended the order for Mumbai and shut the shops down. He was abruptly transferred a few days later and sent to the United Nations as a consultant.
In 2021, he took voluntary retirement after missing the chance of becoming the chief secretary, with the then Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government appointing Sitaram Kunte instead. He then joined the National Capacity Building Commission as member-administration. In 2022, the MVA government collapsed, and a coalition of Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and BJP took over.
Within a year, Pardeshi was back in action in Maharashtra as the chief executive officer of MITRA, or Maharashtra Institution for Transformation. As MITRA CEO, Pardeshi has been instrumental in maintaining relations with external funding agencies to raise capital expenditure for infrastructure projects, officials said, adding that he has good relations with international agencies, like World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and so on. Pardeshi has several contacts across countries, owing to his experience working with the UN in key roles, such as the senior coordinator for international strategy on disaster reduction, and global head of the United Nations Development Programme Geneva post-conflict recovery unit, they added.
Under Pardeshi, MITRA has drawn up a roadmap for Maharashtra to become a trillion dollar economy. “In a way, his appointment as chief economic adviser complements his role as MITRA CEO, and he will be able to act on that economic roadmap more efficiently,” the first of the two serving officers quoted above said. Pardeshi, an economics graduate, has previously worked with departments and government bodies related to forests, environment, finance, urban development and revenue.
His most celebrated posting was as the district collector of Latur, where he was credited for efficiently rehabilitating victims of the 1993 earthquake. Post retirement, Pardeshi focused a lot on social work in Dharashiv district, formerly known as Osmanabad, and was even vying for a ticket from the constituency for the Lok Sabha polls as a BJP candidate. The seat, however, had gone to NCP’s kitty.
Clearly, Fadnavis had other plans for his favourite officer. (Edited by Mannat Chugh) Also Read: One half of Odisha’s IAS power couple & face of BJD’s Mission Shakti, Sujata Karthikeyan takes VRS var ytflag = 0;var myListener = function() {document.removeEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);lazyloadmyframes();};document.
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