Months after he sought voluntary retirement from service, the government of Tamil Nadu accepted IAS officer Santhosh Babu’s retirement request. He still has eight years of service left as per the civil service rules.
In a personal text message to his close friends, the bureaucrat said that the state government has issued his Voluntary Retirement from Service (VRS) order with effect from Saturday afternoon. “My work in government, I think, has been very significant...Please wish me good luck for my future endeavours,” he wrote.
Santhosh Babu, a 1995-batch Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer, had sought retirement from service in January 2020. However, shortly after his request, the government of Tamil Nadu posted him as the Chairman and Managing Director of Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Development Corporation Limited (TNHDCL). He was already holding additional charge of TNHDCL since September 2019. Following his retirement request, it was widely speculated that he was upset over the undue pressure placed on him from the ruling dispensation to approve a tender in Tamil Nadu Fiber Net Corporation (TANFINET), of which he was the Managing Director. He was also the Principal Secretary to the government in the Department of Information Technology.
He was shunted out of the Department of Information Technology around a month after the tender for a Rs 2000-crore BharatNet project was floated by TANFINET. Months later, in May, Chennai-based anti-corruption NGO Arappor Iyakkam flagged the tender for favouring a few companies. The NGO wrote to the union government accusing the state government of bringing in changes to the tender criteria through a corrigendum in April, rendering most companies ineligible to bid for the tender. The centre subsequently cancelled the tender and directed the state government to issue a fresh tender for the project, which aims to connect around 2500 village panchayats in Tamil Nadu using fiber optic cable.
His retirement surprised many in the political and bureaucratic circles with the Leader of the opposition MK Stalin demanding that Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami respond on the matter.