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CVC can receive complaints from whistle-blowers, Court told

By Our Legal Correspondent

NEW DELHI, APRIL 27. The Government yesterday informed the Supreme Court that it had passed a resolution empowering the Chief Vigilance Commission (CVC) to receive complaints from whistle-blowers bringing to light corruption in public life.

The Solicitor-General, Kirit Raval, submitted before a Bench of Justice Ruma Pal and Justice P. Venkatarama Reddi that the Ministry of Personnel passed a resolution on April 21 notifying the CVC as the designated authority to receive complaints from whistle-blowers.

He said that under the resolution, complaints or disclosure of corruption or misuse of office by any employee of the Central Government Corporation, companies and societies or local authorities, could be received by the CVC. India had become the fifth country in the world after the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand to have a law protecting the whistle-blowers.

On the directions of the Court, Mr. Raval framed a scheme for protecting whistle-blowers as an interim measure before Parliament took up a bill in this regard, and after the Court approved this scheme, the Government notified it through the resolution. The resolution, while making leakage of the name of a whistle-blower an offence, gave powers to the CVC to conduct a preliminary inquiry into the complaint and initiate appropriate proceedings against the person erring.

The Bench was hearing a petition from advocate Rakesh Upadhyay, who sought a direction to the Centre to evolve a system as recommended by the Constitution Review Committee in 2002 in the Whistle-Blowers Act to ensure protection to the citizen/person complaining about the corrupt system and to keep the complainant's name secret. He also sought an order for a CBI probe into the death of engineer Satyendra Dubey in Bihar. The Bench asked the Government to give adequate publicity to the resolution in English and vernacular newspapers and adjourned the proceedings to July.

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