CBI, govt on same page over autonomy to the agency

The SC Bench had called the CBI a "caged parrot"

The Central Bureau of Investigation is likely to get more autonomy soon, with its director to get the status of a secretary to the government. The agency told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that most of the proposals it had suggested earlier in this regard had been agreed to by the government.

CBI has pursued this matter to make its director “more empowered to enforce and ensure more professional, efficient, expeditious and impartial conduct of investigations”. A senior CBI official said the agency expects a notification soon in this regard from the department of personnel and training.

Last November, the government had opposed the CBI director getting the status of a secretary, as vesting too much power in one authority. The CBI counsel told the court on Wednesday the formula was largely agreeable to the government now, though some issues such as autonomy were yet to be sorted. The apex court Bench headed by R M Lodha had taken up the autonomy issue after the complaint that top executives and politicians were found interfering with the agency’s probe into the coal block allotment scam. The matter had led to the resignation of law minister Ashwani Kumar. The SC bench had also said the CBI was a “caged parrot”.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his address at the CBI’s annual conference recently, had said while autonomy in investigation was guaranteed, there was a distinction between “operational autonomy and the rules of oversight, supervision and control in organisational and institutional matters that are normal for public bodies of the executive funded by public money”. Singh said it would be worthwhile to introspect if the debate on autonomy lost sight of the fact that the CBI and other investigating agencies were part of the executive. Disagreement between CBI and the political arm of the government has increased since then, with the agency and the government arguing on opposite sides and the judges nudging the government to grant the CBI more independence.