Autonomy For Cbi Being Considered

Such investigative organisations need to be accountable. The idea behind raising the question of autonomy is to ensure that executive arbitrariness does not impinge upon impartial fucntioning of the CBI, the committee said in its 33rd report presented to Parliament. It said the contention of the government that the matter requires careful and in-depth study did not appear to be convincing. Several reports to this effect had been prepared but no action had been taken on them, the committee noted. The L P Singh committee, appointed to review the functioning of CBI had inter-alia recommended reconstitution of CBI defining its power and charter of work .

director, CBI, the terms and conditions of appointment and the manner of his removal. The Jaswant Singh panel had made some major recommendations in its 13th report which included giving status and well defined legal powers to the CBI.

The committee would like to know how many such reports exist and what are their recommendations, and impresses upon the government, the need for taking steps to study them and implement those which are found desirable and feasible.

The committee said the CBI's workload was increasing tremendously and the nature of cases it was being asked to investigate were getting complex, a fair number of them white collar crimes.

In such a scenario it was absolutely necessary that the reorganisation and modernisation of the cbi was done on a regular basis to enable it to keep in step with the challenges it is called upon to tackle.

The committee said it was satisfied with the measures being taken to fill the vacant posts in the CBI. It wanted to know whether there were any provisions for pre-entry and post-entry training of CBI personnel to enable them to deal with the increasing number and complexity of white collar crimes.

Investigation would be more effective if the CBI teams coordinate with other investigative teams of different ministries or departments while working on cases of similar nature.

The committee felt that a country-wide dedicated communication network for the CBI would facilitate speedy dissemination of information among the agency's various centres as well as help maintain confidentiality.