Up Ias Body To Broadbase Fight Against Graft

The radicals in the Uttar Pradesh IAS association are not content with naming the three most corrupt officers and getting them punished, but are trying to form a broad-based action group to pursue their goal of cleansing the services.

In a major initiative, Vijay Shanker Pandey, a leading radical, has sent over 1,000 copies of a letter to the members of other services, like the IPS, IAS, PCS etc, inviting them to form such a group, with the following functions to be taken up immediately till a charter of activities can be drawn up. These are :

To highlight the serious hurdles that any honest and well meaning officer or individual faces in discharging his normal duties ;

To support all the officers wholeheartedly to fight against illegality and dishonesty; the whole group to support if any honest officer is subject to harassment for his propensity to resist illegality.

This group will keep on attacking the illicit wealth accumulated by corrupt officers;

The group will collect information and will move the government agencies e.g; vigilance department, income tax department, Lok Ayukt, and other government institutions to unearth the unethically collected wealth of unscrupulous officers.

The group is to consist of individuals drawn from various services, and later, from outside professions. Already some success has been achieved. The core group formed consists of PC Chaturvedi, GB Patnaik, SR Lakha, Ravindra Singh, Hardeo Singh; Vinita Kumar, P K Mohanti, Sunil Kumar, besides Pandey himself, all from IAS; Reema Singh, from IRS, Pramod Kumar from PCS and Vijay Bahadur Singh from the Indian Audit Service. This is only a beginning, says Pandey.

Once this is formed and becomes effective, all escape route for the corrupt will be closed.

The radical have become much stronger after the association passed the resolution for choosing the three corrupt officers and sending their names to the chief secretary for appropriate action. Their viewpoint was accepted by the whole body and now this will get repeated in all the general body meetings.

Once other services join in, the trend will gain momentum.

The letter points out that quite often we condemn things in private and even express our anguish also, but do practically nothing to remedy it. We can identify many evils prevailing in the administration like corruption, false reporting, lack of transparency etc. Can every thing be changed overnight? The answer will be no, but one must try to change things for the better. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever.

Lastly, it gives a call that the time has come to act fast. The experience of the last one year has proved that things can be corrected. The process can be expedited if we are willing to make sincere efforts in that direction.