Instead, Director of Municipal Administration, Mumbai, P S Meena will now be the new Municipal Commissioner. Lakhina, who was slated to replace present Municipal Commissioner, Shivajirao Deshmukh, has now been moved to as Chairman-cum-Managing Director of CIDCO. Deshmukh has been promoted and posted as Secretary (Agriculture).

The State government on Monday issued transfer orders to several senior bureaucrats in the State, prominent among them being former divisional commissioner, Nagpur, and present Secretary (Cooperation) Shahzad Hussein, who has been transferred as Secretary (Textiles). Additional Commissioner, Nagpur Division, Nanak Ramteke has been shifted as Director, Handlooms Powerloom and Textiles.

The State had issued a first list of transfers of bureaucrats a couple of days back in which Arun Kumar Lakhina wasposted as the Nagpur Municipal Commissioner. But even before Lakhina could take charge at the NMC, he has now been asked to join CIDCO.

The new civic chief, P S Meena, has in the region earlier as the District Collector of Gadchiroli.

Outgoing municipal commissioner Shivajirao Deshmukh, a seasoned administrator, had been dragged into a controversy by a large section of corporators belonging to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP corporators had recently met District Guardian Minister Nitin Gadkari and demanded Deshmukh's transfer after charging him with delaying developmental works in the city.

However, in her several press briefings after assuming charge as the city Mayor, Kalpana Pande had also criticised the NMC bureaucracy, which she claimed, was behaving in an autocratic manner, particularly after the scrapping of the Mayor-in-Council experiment. The ruling BJP had even charged senior NMC officials with stalling some of the ambitious projects launched by former Mayor DevendraPhadanvis.

Deshmukh, on the other hand, has been instrumental in accelerating the literacy campaign of the NMC and had launched a massive programme to hold a mid-term performance test of the neo-literates. The test had helped the NMC to identify the shortcomings in the programme and rectify them to implement the campaign effectively.