Corruption cases against 15 officers of the Indian Administrative Service are pending with the Department of Personnel and Training, which is responsible for granting investigative agencies the sanction to prosecute IAS officers facing corruption charges.
According to information provided by the DoPT—which comes under the Ministry of Personnel, Public grievances and Pensions—the department received proposals of sanction for prosecution of 34 officers in 59 corruption cases from various investigative agencies/state governments between 2010 to 2013.
Out of these, sanction for prosecution of 19 IAS officers was granted in 33 cases under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988.
The department refused sanction to prosecute five IAS officers and returned four proposals relating to two officers who had retired.
Sanction to prosecute 15 other officers in 17 cases is still pending with the DoPT according to official information accessed under the Right to Information Act by Indore-based RTI activist Anand Rai.
The pending cases include IAS officers Arvind Joshi and Tinu Joshi from Madhya Pradesh, facing charges of amassing assets disproportionate to their income. The case of the officer couple had come to light in 2011 after raids by the Income Tax department revealed they had accumulated assets worth Rs. 360 crore.
The maximum number of officers, against whom sanction for prosecution was sought, are from the Madhya Pradesh cadre (7; 3 granted) followed by Andhra Pradesh (6; 1 granted).
However, when it comes to maximum cases, Orissa cadre (15) leads all other states thanks to IAS officer Vinod Kumar, against whom sanction was sought in 12 cases of corruption, two of which are pending.
Orissa is followed by Madhya Pradesh (10), Andhra Pradesh (8), Jharkhand (5) and West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh (3 each) in the number of cases of corruption where sanction was sought.
Officers for whom sanction for prosecution was refused include Subhash Chand Ahluwalia (HP), presently posted as Media advisor-cum-Principal Private Secretary to the Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh.
Sanction was also refused for prosecuting another officer from the HP cadre, Sanjay Gupta, who interestingly had probed a land grab scam against Virbhadra Singh and his family in 2002.
Other officers for whom sanction was refused include V.P. Baligar from Karnataka and Raghav Chandra and Chaturbhuj Singh from the Madhya Pradesh cadre.
The Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta had asked the DoPT to grant sanction to prosecute Mr. Chandra— presently Additional Secretary in the union ministry of agriculture—in a multi-crore land scam in Katni district, following a Supreme Court order which upheld the findings of a special Lokayukta court against the officer.
The list includes one officer each from the Rajasthan cadre--Ravi Shankar Shrivastava--and Jammu and Kashmir cadre--Basheer Khan. Sanction to prosecute these officers was granted by the DoPT in 2011 and 2013 respectively.
