MP minister meets Dalit IAS officer who alleged bias

The meeting was called reportedly on the advice of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, amid the uproar over a Dalit student’s suicide in Hyderabad.

A Dalit IAS officer, who had alleged discrimination on caste grounds, was Friday called for a meeting with the Lokayukta and Finance Minister Jayant Malaiya.

Ramesh Thete, a 1993-batch officer who had threatened to commit suicide in 2011 and continues to take on the government, told The Indian Express that the meeting had given him a ray of hope.

The meeting was called reportedly on the advice of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, amid the uproar over a Dalit student’s suicide in Hyderabad.

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Thete also drafted a letter for another Dalit bureaucrat, Shashi Karnawat, who forwarded it to the CM on Friday. In the letter, Karnawat requested the government to increase her subsistence allowance to 75 per cent of her salary, and not oppose her application in court seeking a stay on her conviction.

Karnawat was suspended in 2013 after an anti-corruption court sentenced her to five years in jail. Her appeal against the conviction is pending. The officer alleged she was framed in the case, while upper-caste bureaucrats were spared for similar offences.

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