Tension is brewing within the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), with a senior woman officer this week accusing an official of “harassment and levelling threats”.

The woman officer’s letter to NDMC chairperson Naresh Kumar on March 20 came just a month after the male official wrote to the Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO) on February 20 seeking an independent external investigation into allegations of junior officials of the law department being threatened.

Role of outsiders

He said the officials of the department had complained of being intimidated by seniors as well as outsiders with regard to handling of certain cases.

In her letter, the woman officer wrote: “It has become a pattern of his behaviour to engage in harassment and levelling threats against others especially female superiors in order to get decisions which he wants pushed and to evade disclosure of pertinent information that are requested from him.”

She alleged that another woman official had also alleged that she was being “stalked” by the same official she accused of harassment. While she referred to the other woman official’s note as “Annexure A”, a copy of the note could not be accessed.

When asked for comment, the chairperson responded that he was out of Delhi and would be back on Saturday night.

Officers ‘demoralised’

Meanwhile, in his letter to the CVO in February, the official had said that law department officers were “demoralised” after the murder of their colleague M.M. Khan, who was killed in 2016 allegedly for refusing to take a bribe in connection with a case he was working on. The letter further stated that law department officials were being threatened that “their career may be harmed if they talk in a particular fashion”.

On December 4, 2018, four officials of the department had written to the chairperson to raise concerns about the functioning of the department. In their letter, they complained that the regular process of routing files was not being followed.

They stated that sometimes the files that had already been examined by senior officials were then sent to relatively junior officers to “render advise which is not only against the professional ethics but also against the hierarchy”.

The officials wrote that the “interference” of outsiders in their functioning was increasing. They alleged that the officers were being forced to sign notes or advise that were not drafted by them or change their opinions.