Post Lokpal, asset details of govt officials to be on Web

The government will seek comprehensive information about all properties, investments and liabilities from every government official and place it on a website once the new anti-graft ombudsman, the Lokpal, starts functioning.

Updated on: Mar 30, 2014, 23:31:35 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government will seek comprehensive information about all properties, investments and liabilities from every government official and place it on a website once the new anti-graft ombudsman, the Lokpal, starts functioning.

The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has circulated a new disclosure format which seeks details of movable, immovable and liquid assests of every government official.

It also wants officials to disclose liquid assests such as insurance premiums and loans on an annual basis after the law comes into force.

Non-disclosure may invite disciplinary action against the official, the department has warned in a draft disclosure format circulated by the department for comments. The new norm also requires the officials to inform whether necessary permission from the government was sought before making a purchase or taking a loan.

It also seeks more detailed information about financial deals made by any public servant.

In all, an officer will have to fill four to five disclosure forms every year and update information about the properties inherited by them.

The Lokpal law requires an official to declare his or her assets and liabilities within 30 days of joining the office and every year by July 31. The declaration will have to be made to a designated officer in each department, who would then forward the same to the Lokpal.

The information from a clerk to cabinet secretary will be available on a web portal to be designated by the Lokpal, the department said.

Such elaborate information is being sought to help the Lokpal in investigating cases of corruption against public servants across central ministries. The new norm, however, fails to explicitly seek asset and liability details of the spouse and dependent children of an official.

“This is not with the letter and spirit of the Lokpal Act and it has been seen that many times officials make investments in name of their wives and children,” said Ventakesh Nayak, a transparency campaigner with Delhi-based advocacy group the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

He suggested that the template used by the Election Commission to seek affidavits from candidates contesting elections to Parliament and state legislatures may be used as a model.

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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