#dnaEdit: Why Centre must heed the judiciary and CBI

The Union government must pay heed to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) director Anil Sinha’s warning that the agency could “collapse and fail” if its demand for more personnel is not immediately met. The CBI chief, appearing before a parliamentary standing committee vetting the agency’s demand for grants for the 2016-17 financial year, testified that against its capacity to investigate 700 cases, a total of 1,200 cases were pending. The CBI also complained that a total of 1,531 posts, over one-fifth of the total sanctioned 7,274 posts, were lying vacant. The importance of the CBI cannot be emphasised enough in a federal system like India where law and order is a state subject but where crimes, especially financial offences, and investigations routinely overlap across state and even international borders. There was a time when the CBI offered hope to those who believed that a central agency would be insulated from local pressures that often subverts state police investigations. This is also evident in the conviction rates: while the CBI had a 69 per cent conviction rate in 2014, the general conviction rate was just 45 per cent in the same year.

Earlier this week, on a similar note, the Chief Justice of India TS Thakur had broken down while pointing fingers at the central government for not appointing enough judges to tackle the huge pendency of cases. The investigator, prosecutor and the judge are the three integral point-persons in the criminal justice delivery system who ensure the primacy of the rule of law. It is important that these three wings are sufficiently staffed if the rule of law is to survive and flourish. The political class, however, has come to view independent-minded investigators, judges, and auditors as spokes in the governance wheel. This suspicion of those who are meant to be watchdogs has clearly contributed to the current state of affairs. The vacancies in the CBI have gone up from 831 in 2012, 878 in 2013, 1,000 in 2014, and 1,101 in 2015. Of this, there are over 700 vacancies for various levels of investigators, and nearly 100 vacancies are of law officers. 

One of the factors that has increased the workload is the recent trend of high courts and the Supreme Court referring cases to the CBI, when demands for a CBI probe were overlooked or rejected by the central and state governments. Last year, the Supreme Court had slammed the CBI and the Centre for not taking effective steps to fill vacancies and “sleeping over” the issue. The CBI had pleaded staff shortage when the Supreme Court had referred the Saradha chit fund scam and the Vyapam scam cases to it. Together, nearly 2,000 regular cases have been lodged in just these two instances, putting a huge strain on the agency’s resources. The quick fix solution that the CBI has suggested is that more state police personnel be deputed to tide over the vacancies. 

Back in 2013, the same parliamentary committee had criticised the Department of Training and Personnel and the CBI for relying on deputation rather than hiring more personnel directly to the CBI cadre. This reliance on deputation officers, who serve shorter tenures in the CBI, but are preferred over the CBI cadre in promotions, is at the root of the agency’s troubles. This stop-gap mode of operation is evident even in the CBI’s charter. Till date, the CBI is governed by the vague and poorly defined Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, and does not have a defined statutory character. All this reinforces the impression that the CBI is a “caged parrot”. It is unfortunate that despite the change of guard at the Centre in 2014, the same ills continue to plague the CBI.