The CBI has admitted to a Parliamentary Standing Committee that vacancies at higher levels in the investigation agency was impacting its work because of the rising burden of investigations assigned to it.

Giving evidence before the Standing Committee, which has just scrutinised its budget allocations for 2018-19, CBI revealed that there were four sanctioned positions of Special and Additional Directors, and three of them were vacant.

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At the level of executive ranks, law officers and technical officers, there were 16 per cent, 28 per cent and 56 per cent vacancies, respectively.

In its report tabled on Wednesday, the committee said it was “apprehensive” that the vacancies could impact CBI’s work as an “increasing number of cases are now being referred to the CBI pertaining to areas like internal security, cyber-crimes, corruption, financial irregularities and the nation can not afford to have its premier investigative agency understaffed and thus ill-prepared”.

On 31 December 2017, there were 1365 cases pending for investigation with the CBI.

The committee said it had earlier, too, told the Government to rectify the situation but its efforts had not yielded the desired results.

Headed by Bhupender Yadav, the committee said steps could be taken in advance to fill up the vacancies, and rules for recruitment could be simplified.

Suggesting a way out, the committee has said that terms of deputation to the CBI could be made more rewarding so as to retain capable officers and attract best officers from State police forces and other units like Intelligence Bureau.

Indicating the premier investigation agency’s work could be suffering from other reasons, the Standing Committee said the agency was slow in spending its allocated funds, which led to further curtailment of its budget allocation.

The committee found that during the current financial year (2017-18), the agency was able to utilise only 12.11 per cent of its revenue funds and 58.37 per cent of capital funds till 22nd February, 2018.

This led to the Finance Ministry reducing the agency’s allocation steeply for 2018-19. There was need to monitor the pace of implementing schemes and projects by the CBI, the committee said.

Commenting that the CBI required constant capacity enhancement and skill development, the committee commended the 2015 announcement of the project, International Centre of Excellence in Investigation (ICEI-CBI), at CBI Academy, Ghaziabad, to provide training in the emerging domains of crime including cybercrime. As of now, the project was stuck at the level of approvals only, the committee said.