Message from CVO on Vigilance Awareness Week-2016

THE NEED FOR PUBLIC PARTICIPATION TO STRENGTHEN PREVENTIVE VIGILANCE

The theme for the message for this year’s Vigilance Awareness Week  is  “Eradication of corruption through  Public Participation”. The CVC  (Central Vigilance Commission)  has directed the vigilance wings of all central government organizations and public sector units to spread awareness against corruption and seek public participation to eliminate this great evil  which has been eating the vitals of our society and weakening governance efforts for a long time. What is most significant, particularly in this year,  is the scale of awareness campaign  urged by CVC - it has been directed that not only pledges  be administered to the officers and staff of government units but, for the first time,  to do the same to the citizens of the nation . The directive to organize interaction/meetings   with external stakeholders and hold redressal  camps   for them is also a first time measure in this area.

What really triggers public participation for  eradication of corruption on a significant scale? What are the factors that prompts the external stakeholders  to get  interested in helping government units in the efforts for controlling and eliminating corruption from various areas of governance?

We can isolate, among others, the following three important preconditions :

•        Availability of information: This is an important condition for the public to participate in anticorruption efforts . It is only when they have   an inner view  of the governance functions of a  organization/department that they will be able to analyse and report any systemic distortion or vulnerability to the concerned authorities. One of such tool for the public is of course to reset to Right to Information Act to get particular information. But this approach presumes that se the RTI applicant to be  aware of some basic ingredient of the information it is looking for. Many a time, an average  person-on-the street simply does not have any prior knowledge of an Organization’s structure or activities.  In such cases, it was difficult for him to seek information on areas that are prone to leakages, corruption or manipulation and his/her queries are a likely to be non-specific and vague as has been our experience in the past. On the other hand if vital governmental decisions like award  of   contracts/licenses/approvals are displayed in a transparent manner on the website of the organization, it may the average public impose meaningful queries and up in information from the government authorities for subsequent analysis.

•        User-defined Retrieval to impart actionabilty to published  information : In many governmental websites, the information displayed is often not useful to the seeker. For example if information is displayed in database format with facility  for posing  user-defined queries, they  become much more retrievable than the websites that merely  display information in  textual or image formats. Similarly  information on complex high value contracts  becomes useful  only when an user has accesses to its drilled-down versions to detect line- item level data.  Thorugh these ICT measures  public  can be  enabled  not just to  download static information  that may be available in the web-site but also be in a position to analyse historical  data , discern decision-making-trends  and  know activity-wise budgetary  allocation of the concerned government organization. A more aware public,  able to retrieve actionable information, would have   greater tendency  to participate  and contribute to anti-corruption efforts   then what would be achieved by  a handful  officials of the vigilance wing often hamstrung by inadequate infrastructure and manpower.

•        Safety  and security of the informer with a Reward Mechanism : even after being a word of a particular information public might not participate if they feel that they will be harmed subsequently by those whom they want to expose. In other words we must have a robust whistleblowing mechanism that protects the safety of the whistleblower. Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Informer (PIDPI) Resolution is one such scheme of CVC where an informer can report acts of corruption or the leakage   where government vigilance unit  or directly to CVC  without the apprehension of being identified later. In such cases CVC for what the complaint without revealing the identity of the complainant to the concerned vigilance unit for investigation and report to the commission. Such complaints are generally accorded top priority by CVC   in ordering expeditious and time bound investigation.

However countries like United States of America have schemes which not only protects the identity of the whistleblower but  go much farther by rewarding  the informer a substantial portion   of the recovered amount if his/her information proven to be correct leading  to actual recovery.  An Act in USA called the “False Claims Act” (FCA) achieves that objective brilliantly and is worth emulating in our country. This Act, also called the  Lincoln Law , exists in USA since 1863 and  allows people who are not affiliated with the government, called "relators" under the law, to file actions on behalf of the government (informally called "whistleblowing" when the relator is employed by the organization accused in the suit). Persons filing under the Act stand to receive a  portion of any recovered damages. As of 2012, over 70 percent of all federal Government FCA actions were initiated by whistleblowers. Claims under the law have typically involved health care, military, or other government spending programs, and dominate the list of largest pharmaceutical settlements. So far the US  government recovered $38.9 billion under the False Claims Act between 1987 and 2013 and of this amount, $27.2 billion or 70% was had been  brought by relators. The extent of public participation and the recovery of such huge sums in USA through the above Act  is a pointer to what can further be done in attracting public participation on a massive scale in our  Indian setup which definitely needs more vigilant action in governance functions than  the United States.

S.K.Sadangi 

CVO (KoPT)

What is Corruption”  as per  United Nation’s Convention Against Corruption(UNCAC)