Ordinance extending terms of agencies' chiefs may produce desired results

Imagine a cricket team where every member is designated a captain. It is not hard to figure out the result. Or imagine a mountaineering team in which every member has the right to decide to stop or begin a climb. These examples are useful to understand how the relations among India’s national investigation teams have shaped up in recent years. Of the 15-odd national investigation agencies at the Centre, there has been a rank creep. The heads of most of them hold the same rank, that of special secretary to the Government of India. 

In this context, the Centre’s November 15 Ordinance can be read as an attempt to change the order of seniority among the more prominent of them. The Ordinance notes that from now, the term of the Director of Intelligence Bureau (IB), Secretary of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the Directors of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) will be extendable by up to five years from their original span of two years.

The number of years these officers will be in power will make them effectively senior to all the others occupying corner rooms in all the other agencies. This is extremely significant. Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service officers in a batch usually get promoted together even at the top ranks, such as additional secretary or special secretaries. They also retire together. With the Ordinance, however, the CBI director, for instance, will still be in office long after his batchmates have retired. The next heads of, say, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) or that of National Intelligence Grid, or NATGRID, will be clearly junior to him, batch-wise, if not in rank. 

This is a significant change not least because among all the investigation agencies at the Centre, the extent of coordination is often abysmal. It has become a huge challenge when new patterns of crime, including those in cyber space, have spread. One of the reasons for the lack of cooperation is that all incumbents feel they are equal, and unless asked to do so, do not reach out to each other with tips or feedback. Leaderships at the central government have often tried to sort out these problems by creating coordination agencies but with little success. Instead, those coordinating agencies have become just one more investigating institution in the list. 

This is quite unlike the policy-making apparatus in the financial sector. After some reservations over rank, the banking, marketing and insurance regulators have recognised the need for inter-agency coordination and meet every half year at the Financial Stability and Development Council, headed by the finance minister. In between, there are sub committees like the one headed by the Reserve Bank of India governor, which meet more frequently, to sort out troubles among them. The Financial Stability and Development Council is a follow-up of the erstwhile High Level Committee for Coordination of Capital Markets in place since the mid-nineties. The leadership role is well established. 

In contrast, the first National Conference of Investigation Agencies at an all-India level was held as late as in August 2016. The initiative by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) and the NIA was meant to “provide a platform for the country’s different law enforcement agencies to come together and discuss a coordinated strategy to tackle crime”. Even this has not taken off. There has been no similar such event since then. Instead, almost all the agencies organise their own events. For instance, last week, the prime minister attended the 56th Conference of Director Generals of Police and Inspector Generals of Police. Some of the chiefs of various other investigation agencies, who are of inspector general (IG) and director general (DG) police rank, also attended. The CBI organises its annual vigilance awareness and anti-corruption events, and so on. 

The results are evident. Little information gleaned by these agencies is shared with others and that’s not just because some of the agencies report to the home ministry and others to the finance ministry, though that exacerbates the problem. In 1985, the Centre set up the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau, “mandated to ensure effective interaction and coordination” among all the agencies concerned in the area of economic offences. It also functions as the clearing house of all economic intelligence and provides a platform for such exchange between various agencies within the Department of Revenue and other intelligence and enforcement agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau, RAW and the CBI. Compare this with the Financial Intelligence Unit set up two decades later as the “central national agency responsible for receiving, processing, analysing and disseminating information relating to suspect financial transactions. (It) is also responsible for coordinating and strengthening efforts of national and international intelligence, investigation and enforcement agencies in pursuing the global efforts against money laundering and related crimes”. 

Similar is the case with narcotics, in the news now. The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, chases trade and production of illicit cannabis and poppy and any other types of drugs. The Department of Revenue Intelligence, or DRI, under the finance ministry also monitors the trade of narcotics but across borders. There is also the Central Bureau of Narcotics, again under the finance ministry, to monitor licit production of poppy (for medicinal purposes, for instance) and processing chemicals. Finally, there is the state police, which does 85 per cent of the seizures but, as each state government acknowledges, could do far more. There are several more such examples, but each highlights why these agencies are unable to push prosecution in finance and other crimes effectively. 

While there have been justifiable concerns that the provisions in the Ordinance to offer year-by-year extension to the chiefs of CBI, ED, IB and RAW will make for political encroachment, it is also true that the current poor level of convictions for all sorts of crimes is no advertisement for the current model. Investigators at all levels complain that prosecutions suffer because evidence is not shared. It took 20 years for a Multi-Agency Centre, formed in 2001 to track terrorism and cross-border infiltration data after the Kargil war, to be revised and expanded to form a National Memory Bank under the IB this year. 

The data has started flowing, but it will take leadership to decide on its importance, agnostic of who has collected it. As of now, all the chiefs of these agencies not only have the same rank, they are also often from the same batch in many cases. It is impossible to establish an effective command structure in the circumstances. The Ordinance could be a way, however, to produce desired results.