In Manmohan Singh's case, there was no pre-mediated action, says Vinod Rai

His book may have breathed fresh fire into the allegations of malfeasance against Manmohan Singh, but, in an interview to dna, former CAG Vinod Rai ruled out any attempt to "nail" the former prime minister.

Rai, who retired in May last year, also said that it would be "far-fetched" to extend to Singh the charges of criminal culpability levelled by the court against A Raja, Kanimozhi and others. "In Singh's case, there was no pre-mediated action," Rai elaborated. "In Raja's case, it is very much a pre-mediated action and that started in 2006 itself with the terms of reference [of the spectrum allocation] being altered."

Rai's just-published memoir, titled "Not Just An Accountant:The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper" recounts how Raja kept the prime minister informed of every change that he made to the spectrum allocation process which resulted, according to the CAG's estimates, in a loss of Rs 1,75,000 crore to the exchequer.

Rai's book also throws up the contradiction between Singh's statement that he wanted coal mines to be allocated on the basis of auctions and his inability to change the old opaque and corrupt screening-committee system. "If I make a statement that I want to introduce a system, and I am numero uno, what stops me from introducing the system," Rai asked.

Rai is clearly irked at the vituperation that he and the office of CAG had to face while he was in office, and his memoirs are his way of setting the record straight, recounting the CAG's actions and the complex, technical issues in"simple, racy language" that general public could understand. "It is my firm belief that audit cannot be confined to audit reports and parliament only...public opinion should be sensitised about how public money was being spent and on what purposes," Rai said.

"There's a lot of sweat that goes into the preparation of these reports. The department does not put into paper a single word or a sentence which is not backed by a document. And to say that these are untrained kind of people, that they are not professionally competent is very unfair," he explained.

Certainly, the book seems to have given Rai a certain freedom to write forthrightly about the high-profile cases of corruption and crony capitalism that his office investigated under him, in a way that he never could have done as a bureaucrat.

In the book, Rai gives the instance of how an upright officer, Indian Airlines managing director Sunil Arora, was shunted off to his state cadre after he wrote to the cabinet secretary about civil aviation minister Praful Patel's undue intervention in the operations of the airline.

"How do you introduce transparency in the government system? Sunil Arora's letter never saw the light of day and he got pilloried because of that letter; Jitendra Bhargava had to quit Air India. Patel even tried to get the book banned. I must, as a bureaucrat, operate in a transparent fashion and if there is something that impedes it, I must bring it out," Rai said.