Watchdogs join forces in anti-corruption crusade

For the past two years, heads of India’s three anti-corruption watchdogs – the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) – have been meeting every three months. The purpose is to share information and get updates on similar cases that the three bodies have been chasing.

Establishing this communication channel is believed to be the brain child of Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai, who has in the past been accused of overreaching by the government. This coordination among watchdogs was absent until Rai took over as the head of the country’s apex audit agency.

Sources in CAG, on the condition of anonymity, said heads of the three bodies had been meeting every three months in the past two years. These meetings had been kept strictly “informal”, and no minutes of the meeting or any record had been maintained. Senior CBI officials also confirmed this.

A CAG official said, though these interactions might be made formal in future, a possible reason for not doing so was to avoid the agenda of the meeting coming under the purview of the Right to Information Act. That might have affected investigations.

According to people in the know, these meetings were as informal as a casual chat over dinner. However, most of the meetings were held in the CAG office. Sources said the auditor usually took a call on when to have the meeting. The last such meeting took place in the last week of September at the CAG office, while the next one is expected to be held in December.

Senior CBI officials confirmed that such meetings had been taking place and the information coming from CAG had been very useful in the investigation of some cases. A senior official added, since CAG and CVC were not authorised to register a First Information Report (FIR), CBI’s role became crucial and the inter-agency coordination came in handy.

In the last couple of years, the interaction between these bodies has increased. In the process of auditing, the information gathered by CAG becomes crucial to CBI’s investigations too. The 2G spectrum scam and the KG-D6 basin case being examples of this. The probe into Airbus acquisitions after CAG filed its audit report is the latest instance. “CAG reports, providing great insights into cases, have been very helpful in some of our investigations. We are in constant touch on a need-to-need basis,” the senior official said.