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| Feb 14, 2000 | ||
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| BUREAUCRACY Caught in the Web By putting up names of suspect government officers on the CVC website, Vittal has given a sense of immediacy to the issue of corruption. By Sayantan Chakravarty
Is this the familiar language of the bureaucracy in India? Surely not. But who says N. Vittal, the 1960-batch IAS officer who was appointed central vigilance commissioner (CVC) in September 1998, is the archetype of the Indian bureaucrat -- suave, non-committal and ever willing to serve the political master of the day? Within months of assuming office at Jaisalmer House, the headquarters of the CVC, he set strict time limits to be followed by the competent authority for sanction of prosecution -- or its refusal -- under the Prevention of Corruption Act concerning employees accused of graft. It was a shock which the bureaucracy had to stomach. Vittal got eyebrows arching further up when he invited junior officers to report directly to him about their seniors' corruption. He made it a rule that every government organisation post on notice boards the details of each tender after its finalisation, and the particulars of every out of turn allotment. "To turn the vicious circle of corruption into virtuous," he said at that time, "you need simple rules, transparency and effective punishment. But I'd put transparency first." He has stuck to his word but has switched the medium -- from office notice boards to the World Wide Web. In end-January, when the official website of the CVC, http://www.cvc.nic.in, suddenly put up two pages containing lists of 86 IAS and 22 IPS officers against whom "the commission has advised initiation of criminal/department proceedings for major penalty since 1.1.90", all hell broke loose. Though civil servants were careful not to make public statements condemning the move, their frantic calls kept the telephones incessantly jangling on the desks of Personnel Secretary B.B. Tandon and V.S. Mathur, a vigilance commissioner who, as reports filtered out, felt outraged because Vittal did not consult him before putting up the names on the website. Vittal's list is far from a meticulously prepared one. Many of the names on the IAS list are not quite members of the service. Former Union industry secretary Suresh Kumar, whose name was on the list, had bowed out of the world some years back. That's a lapse for which Vittal had to apologise to Mrs Kumar. The list also contained the names of officers against whom only the "first term advice" had been given to the Government. That is the earliest step in vigilance proceedings. It must be followed by a show-cause notice to the suspect officer, and the final advice to the disciplinary authority -- be it the ministry concerned or the parent cadre -- is given after the officer's explanation is considered by the CVC. The principle is embedded in the rule of law: nobody can be prosecuted without giving him a hearing. Vittal obviously acted in a hurry, for many of the officers included in his lists had not gone past the preliminary stage. Says D.K. Verma, former chairman and managing director of Hindustan Shipyard, Vizag, and currently chief of Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilisers, whose name is on the list: "I have not even been served with a memo yet." If Verma is to be believed, the case against him, if it existed, did not enter the preliminary stage even. In most cases, the column under "date of issue of charge-sheet" read: "Information awaited". That heightened the ambiguity surrounding the entire exercise. Could the tardiness of information be due to the officer's refusal to reply to the show-cause notice? Or was it because of the concerned department tarrying in its obligation to either sanction prosecution or refuse it? Despite the shoddiness of Vittal's "digital assault" on bureaucratic corruption, its timing was perfect. It came when the future of the CVC, and its powers, rested in the hands of a Joint Select Committee (JSC) of Parliament, headed by Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar. Earlier, following a 1997 order by the Supreme Court in the Jain hawala case, the Union Government was directed to insulate the anti-corruption agencies (CBI and the Enforcement Directorate) against political interference by enabling the CVC to supervise the agencies. The BJP-led Government, in deference to the order, sought to make the CVC a statutory body but the Government fell before it could pass the necessary legislation. And now the JSC is seized of the CVC Bill. If the MPs decide that there should be curbs on the CVC's power of blowing the whistle on corruption among public servants, particularly civil servants, so will it be. However, Vittal's disclosure on the web, for all its worth, is a grim presentation before the JSC of the extent to which corruption in the bureaucracy is tolerated by the state. In the list of IAS and other officers, there are as many as 17 names against whom penal proceedings were initiated before 1995. None of them has been convicted. Fifteen of them are unfazed as either they have not cared to reply to the CVC's show-cause notice or the relevant departments have not got back to the CVC on sanction, or refusal, to prosecute them. If Vittal aimed at telling the JSC that the CVC is indeed a toothless tiger without the powers promised in the CVC Bill, nothing could be more effective than putting out the lists in the public domain. Though the named officers have begun frantically petitioning the JSC members for showing Vittal his place, that is unlikely to happen. M. Venkaiah Naidu, general secretary of the BJP and JSC member, says the CVC advice for penal proceedings is a "public document" and there was nothing wrong in putting out such information on the web. There was a surprising chorus of praise for Vittal's move even outside the JSC. Union Law Minister Ram Jethmalani said "publication of truth" cannot be opposed by "any sensible person". Even the IPS Association, which would be very angry with Vittal, as everyone expected, was unexpectedly cool. Kamlendra Prasad, dig in the National Security Guards and secretary, IPS Association, said: "Traditionally the CVC sends the same list to Parliament every year. Placing it before Parliament is as good as making it public. Nothing is therefore new in it." The underlying fact of Prasad's statement exposes the cynical disregard of corruption within the state. As Vittal never tires of saying, "For 35 years, Parliament has not discussed the CVC's annual report." The annual report, containing pretty much the same lists put out now on the CVC web site, was presented to Parliament every year since the formation of the CVC in February 1964 on the recommendation of an anti-corruption panel headed by the late K. Santhanam. It is clear that by publishing the names of certain civil servants on the CVC website, Vittal has focused public attention on the issue of corruption at a time when a parliamentary committee has to take a crucial decision on whether politicians should give a free hand to the enforcement agencies. It comes at a time when as many as 3,484 anti-corruption cases initiated by the CBI are pending in courts for slackness in prosecution, with 1,198 of them hanging fire for two to five years. The reputation of the CBI has hit its nadir, with judges giving discharge orders after remarking that they are helpless because of the prosecution's failures. And now Vittal's web offensive is showing results even in the most unexpected quarters, the CBI, which raided the office and residence of a high ranking police officer, J.K. Sharma, in Delhi and reportedly put 37 IAS and IPS officers in the capital on its watch list. Such alertness could not have been more timely. India has recently been ranked 68th among 85 nations in the "corruption perception index" prepared by an international watchdog, Transparency International. Even countries like Malawi, Belarus and Ghana figure above India on the list. Vittal has written in a recent paper: "My goal as the CVC is to see that before I hand over charge on September 2, 2002, India's rank improves from 66 to at least 40, if not 30." The ambition may be tall but not unachievable. |
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