AMAN SHARMA NEW DELHI
(INDIA TODAY) Central Vigilance Commissioner Pradeep Kumar has credited Gandhian Anna Hazare for prompting the government to launch some far-reaching anti-corruption reforms.
Kumar made the remarks during his address to an international conference in Morocco on October 22, which was posted on the CVC website on Saturday.
The CVC described Hazare’s movement as a “very popular one in India”.
“As the world’s largest democracy, India faces a unique challenge. India is currently going through an era of far-reaching reforms in anti-corruption, prompted by popular anti-corruption movements. The movement is demanding the creation of a new anti-corruption authority to be known as the Lokpal, which means ‘people’s patron’, to focus on corruption involving high-level public officials and senior politicians,” Kumar told the gathering.
He then went on to list the measures the government was taking to check corruption, such as the public procurement Act, the whistleblower protection Act and the judicial accountability Bill. He said India was also creating a grievance redressal authority and citizen’s charter to protect the people from petty corruption and improving delivery of public services.
The remarks could be embarrassing for the Manmohan Singh government, which had been insisting that it was working on bringing anti-corruption mechanisms much before Hazare sat on his fast unto death for bringing the Jan Lokpal Bill.
Continuing to shower praise on Hazare, the CVC underlined the failure of the governments the world over in creating an honest, fair and transparent system while comparing the Gandhian’s agitation with the Arab Spring and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests in the US.
“I am reminded of the famous verse from an Indian epic which says Yatho raja tatho praja, which implies that if the king is immoral so would his subjects be,” the CVC added.
Kumar made the speech at the 5th Annual Conference of International Association of Anti-corruption Authorities at Marrakech in Morocco.
Kumar has been vociferous about corruption at the lower bureaucratic levels, as shown in another of his speeches made public now. On August 24, 2011, he had addressed IPS probationers at the National Police Academy in Hyderabad.
“This (petty corruption) has the most debilitating and direct affect on a large section of the society, particularly the weakest and the poorest, who have to pay bribes to obtain the basic requirements provided by the state, which is rightfully due to them… petty corruption has come to be accepted as a way of life,” Kumar told IPS probationers of the 2009 batch.
In this particular speech, the CVC advocated that punitive reforms were not enough to address corruption but a host of reforms in the governance framework were required such as reforming the process of election funding and expenditure, which Kumar termed a major cause for corruption in India.
Kumar urged transparency and avoidance of conflict of interest in the selection and appointment to all important public offices. Kumar, a senior IAS officer of the 1972 batch, retired as the Union defence secretary earlier this year and took over as the CVC on July 14.»
