HC stays appointment of Parliament secretaries in Telangana

Hyderabad, May 1: The Hyderabad High Court today stayed the operation of a government order appointing Parliament secretaries.

The division bench of Chief Justice Kalyan Jyoti Sengupta and Justice P V Sanjay Kumar, in its interim order, made it clear that the Telangana government would make further appointments to the post only with the court's permission.

The bench was dealing with separate petitions filed by Congress MP G Sukhender Reddy and TDP MLA A Revanth Reddy, challenging the creation of the post of parliamentary secretary through the enactment of Telangana Parliamentary Secretaries Act, 2015.

The petitions allege that the sole objective of creating this post to confer a minister's rank on MLAs in indiscriminate manner. The court found that the procedure for the appointment was not followed. The government order was patently illegal and cannot be allowed to be executed, said the judges.

Advocate general K Ramakrishna Reddy had argued that the act was brought in only to decide the salaries of the parliamentary secretaries who will assist the ministers in the Assembly. The government order, issued in December, appointed MLAs D Vinay Bhaskar, Jalagam Venkat Rao, V Srinivas Goud, G Kishore Kumar, V Satish Kumar and Kova Laxmi as the secretaries. The case would now come up for hearing after the summer vacation.

PTI