It's a strange tale. It's a tale of an unusually cold relationship between a young minister and her equally young IAS officer. The official interaction between the two froze to a point in September 2020 where Uttarakhand minister of state for women and child development, Ms. Rekha Arya, wrote to Dehradun DIG Arun Mohan Joshi to inquire about the whereabouts of her 'missing' IAS officer and additional secretary V Shanmugam because she 'feared' that since the IAS officer had turned 'incommunicado', he might have been 'kidnapped'.

Even though the trouble between the two might have been brewing from the earlier times, it surfaced in September when the IAS officer followed the outsourcing rules and regulations and awarded the contract in a tender possibly against the wishes of the minister. To escape the wrath of the minister, Shanmugam reportedly went into a two-day 'self-isolation' during which he might have deliberately declined to take the call of the minister.

This infuriated the minister and she pressed CM Trivendra Singh Rawat to force an inquiry against the officer. When Additional Chief Secretary Manisha Panwar, who conducted the inquiry, absolved the officer of any 'misconduct' in her report submitted in November, CS Om Prakash advised her, on the advice of the CM, to also incorporate the viewpoints of the minister. So Ms. Panwar took the inquiry to the next stage; and even after incorporating the viewpoints of the minister, nothing was found untoward against the officer since he had followed the due process while awarding the contract and while going on leave for 'self-isolation and Maun Vrat.'

Ms. Panwar had reportedly submitted her final report a few days back.