UPA government blocked reforms to empower CAG: Vinod Rai

NEW DELHI: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the finance ministry stymied a critical five-year old reform proposal to strengthen the office of the Comptroller Auditor General (CAG) of India by enabling it to audit all public private partnerships (PPPs) while setting deadlines for the government to provide information to the auditor and table its findings, ex-CAG Vinod Rai told ET.
Rai expressed optimism that the Narendra Modi government elected to power on ‘its avowed declaration of fighting crony capitalism and corruption’, would take up the necessary ‘minimalistic amendments’ to the 1971 CAG law in order to empower the auditor’s office, which he claimed had been backed by former finance minister and the present President Pranab Mukherjee in September 2009.

But months later, under intense scrutiny from the auditor over myriad corruption scandals such as the 2G and Coal block allocation, the UPA put CAG's formal request for strengthening its hand in cold storage. Mukherjee, his successor P Chidambaram and Singh didn't respond to any communiqués about the reform proposal from the CAG. “I don’t understand why (the UPA chose to ignore the issue)…At first, I thought they were not willing to implement it because of me. But if that were the case, they could have done it after I retired,” the ex-CAG told ET, hinting at the animosity displayed towards him by Congress ministers. In his book, Rai elaborates the various derogatory barbs used by ministers to describe him such as the ‘R-virus’ and the ‘Bhumihar from Ghazipur’, calling it a sign of the lack of decorum and respect politicians now have for constitutional authorities.

“The CAG’s office made numerous enquiries. I wrote reminder letters to finance ministers, with no response. No finance minister has had time to reply. I wrote to the Prime Minister. Silence,” Rai said. “The minimalistic amendments we had sought are still pending and I hope they are now taken up,” he said.

He stressed that the joint ventures, PPPs and other new delivery models used for government spending were not envisaged in the CAG (Duties, Powers and Conditions of Service) Act of 1971. Whether CAG can audit PPPs, a model the government hopes to build half of its trillion dollar infrastructure target with, has been a bone of contention between the auditor’s office and private sector firms working on government projects and contracts. When the CAG kicked off a performance audit of gas blocks awarded under the New Exploration and Licensing Policy, ‘some of the operators and, in particular, Reliance Industries Limited, questioned the mandate of the CAG’, Rai notes in his book.