Goa election commissioner becomes first to declare assets

Not many election commissioners are willing to follow P.M. Bokar’s example. Chief electoral officers in states like Maharashtra have refused to declare their assets.

Updated on: Mar 1, 2009, 24:41:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Goa Election Commissioner P.M. Borkar has become the first election official to declare his assets. However, not many are ready to follow suit.

The Election Commission, in December last year, had made it mandatory for national and state election commissioners and electoral officers to declare their assets after Pune-based financial consultant, Vihar Dhurve, filed an application on the issue.

While the EC has refused to divulge details of assets of the commissioners on the ground that there was no such rule, it forwarded the RTI application to state governments for their respective responses.

Two months later Borkar has declared his assets, worth Rs 17 lakh apart from his salary, in a RTI response to Dhurve. He also provided details of his assets in his wife’s name. “I have nothing to hide,” Borkar told HT.

A Goa civil service official, Borkar was appointed as state election commissioner after he retired from government service a few years ago.

Dhurve said after Shailesh Gandhi, the Central Information Commissioner, Borkar is the second official in the constitutional bodies to declare his assets voluntarily. “They have provided the lead but others are not willing to follow,” Dhurve lamented.

Chief electoral officers of states like Maharashtra have refused to divulge information about their assets. A senior EC official, who didnot want to be named, said there is no provision in the conduct of election rules that makes it mandatory for the election commissioners at the national or the state level to declare assets. “If one has to do it, it is totally voluntary,” he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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