It has been one very long , disquieting month since the conviction of HC Gupta, IAS, Coal Secretary, in the coal block allocation scam.

An appeal is likely to be filed once the Courts resume work after their enviable summer vacation. The civil service fraternity wishes him well and hopes that justice will not elude this time around. However, it should not be forgotten that even if this happens, there remain a dozen-plus probes snapping at him menacingly.

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The unfathomable agony of being abandoned as the convenient fall guy will, sadly, continues to sear unabated. The elevated strains of the efficiently orchestrated celebrations to mark three years of NDA rule have since faded away.

While credit could be claimed for being taint-free at the stratospheric level of governance, the progress in nailing the big-time scamsters of the UPA regime, which had been a mega polltime promise, did not make it to the list of honours.

There is debris still drifting around, wafting stench. Around the same time as Gupta’s conviction, the CBI filed FIRs in two more UPA regime scams related to the Ministry of Finance for grant of FIPB approvals and the Ministry of Civil Aviation, for alleged irregularities in the purchase of 111 aircraft for Air India and Indian Airlines at a cost of Rs.70,000 crore, leasing of several planes without due consideration, and surrendering of the debt-ridden carrier’s profit-making routes and schedules to benefit private players.

These FIRs are against unnamed officials and private persons. No political personalities or ministers feature, though such grave irregularities are unimaginable without their complicity.

The CBI has also launched a preliminary enquiry into the 2007 merger of the two public carriers, IA (Indian Airlines) and AI (Air India), following the decision to place huge orders with Boeing and Airbus, a decision which supposedly cost the public exchequer “tens of thousands of crores”.

There is no information in the public domain about any headway having been made. This needs to be juxtaposed with the presently tenuous fate of AI. The Union Cabinet is said to be looking at various options of a 100 per cent sell-off, a 74 per cent stake sale or a 49 per cent retention of shares in it.

Curiously, the probe dimension has become invisible in the privatisation discourse, leading to speculation ~ probably unjustified ~ that it may just be piloted off the radar at an appropriate juncture. The inescapable takeaway is that above all else, graft probes are de rigueur in regime changes and they ominously assume high leverage quotients as they clip purposefully along, without appearing to do so very overtly.

Ironically, however, through it all, the hubris laden political class ~ being temporarily out of power fazes it not a whit ~ and the cocky upper crust stays smug in the knowledge that there will be no stab in their privileged shield of assumed immunity from the law of the land. At the State level, too, the trickle-down, me-too effect is in evidence. Within 100 days of being in office, the new Government in Uttar Pradesh has recommended CBI probes into several projects of the previous Samajwadi Government.

These include alleged irregularities in the functioning of the Shia and Sunni Waqf Boards, Akhilesh Yadav’s dream project of Gomti riverfront development, the Rs.1100- crore Sachal Palnagriha Yojana ( mobile creche) and siphoning off Rs.455 crore in the DelhiSaharanpur-Yamunotri Highway construction. Other projects under the scanner are land acquisition for the Agra-Lucknow Expressway, the Yash Bharti Awards, Samajwadi Pension Scheme, distribution of bogus ration cards, and cornering of lucrative PWD contracts etc.

SP has, predictably, cried foul and countered that the Government has reduced itself to a mere “Inquiry Committee”. The jaded game will compulsively be thrashed sore. And till the noose reaches anywhere close to striking distance, the tenterhooks will be in activated mode, to serve the need of any complex hour. However, in Uttarakhand, intriguingly, the standard script seems to have gone awry.

The Rawat Government, in the all too familiar “zero-tolerance” mode , sought a CBI probe against officials of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) for alleged irregularities of Rs.240 crore in the acquisition of farmland for the proposed NH 74 in the Uddham Singh district between 2011 and 2016.

Interestingly, the period covered both the UPA and the NDA regimes. The Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, understandably furious, formally contested the charge, conveying that the probe would have an adverse impact on the morale of the officers, since only the State Government had a say in land compensation matters. He went so far as to assert (read, deliver a veiled threat) that the Ministry would have to re-examine whether more projects could be taken up in the State.

Last heard, the NHAI had approached the Uttarakhand High Court to quash the FIR against NHAI officials. The entry into the legal limbo-zone left both Governments hugely embarrassed.

One wonders what went wrong. This brings us to graft probe rejig initiatives, nano or bigbang, currently in the works or ready to roll. It is understood that 39 IAS officers are under investigation for corruption by the Department of Personnel and Training. And 3500 Central Government officials are in the CVC’s net.

Figures are not available separately for the political class. In this backdrop, what is projected in a positive light is the amendment of a 50-year-old rule ~ the Central Civil Services (Classification, Control and Appeal) Rules, to complete probes in graft cases in six months.

According to CVC’s reports, it takes close to eight years to complete an enquiry, detection itself taking two years! An online software has been introduced to record all processes and use cloud-based technology to provide an interface amongst stakeholders.

The portal will initially be adopted in respect of IAS officers posted at the Centre but will be extended to All India Service Officers, Group A employees and the States, in phases. This is planned to work in tandem with the “Online Probity Management System” to make easier the process of assessment of integrity of officers and compulsorily retire those found deficient.

Important changes? Yes. Far reaching? Not really. Unless high-profile graft probes against the crème-de-la -crème of the socio-political upper crust are fast-tracked through radical institutional and systemic rejigs, we the people will continue to be at high risk. The scenario of tantalizingly “hung graft probes” will remain unedifyingly unaltered.

This entails, inter-alia, effecting amendments to the Prevention of Corruption Act, pending for years in Parliament, time-framing of investigations and trials, ensuring and enforcing transparency and accountability and safeguarding professional rights of public servants.

The Prime Minister loves the time-frame of 2022 ~ 75 years post ~ Independence. Why not adopt this for achieving a thorough, convincing and purposeful policy overhaul? Why hand Donald Trump an opportunity to take a smug swipe at our attempts to address corruption which he brands, impressively, as an assault on democracy?

A dismal ranking of 79 in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, 2016, is plain unacceptable for an emerging global power house.

The writer is a retired IAS officer and comments on governance issues