The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : “Law to confiscate property of the corrupt needed”

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Thursday, Nov 06, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

“Law to confiscate property of the corrupt needed”

Special Correspondent

NEYVELI Principal District and Sessions Judge (Cuddalore) D. Ramabathiran has called for rules to confiscate the wealth of those who indulge in corruption.

He was delivering the inaugural address at the Vigilance Awareness Week celebration held at Neyveli Lignite Corporation here on Monday.

As in the case of foreign exchange fraud, provisions should also be made to seize the property of the corrupt persons, Mr. Justice Ramabathiran said.

According to ‘corruption perception index’ of the Transparency International, India stood 85th among 180 countries. Mr. Justice Ramabathiran said that once the birds learnt that the scarecrow was a mock device, they would start building nests on it. Similarly, those who were earlier deterred by anti-corruption rules were now emboldened to bend the rules to their convenience, and the trend ought to be checked by giving more teeth to the law, such as confiscation of property.

The World Bank had defined corruption as “use of public office for private profit,” Mr. Justice Ramabathiran said. Even employees and officials of the NLC were considered to be holding public office and hence, they too had the responsibility to be accountable, he said.

NLC Chairman-cum-Managing Director J.N. Prasannakumar said that every organisation should have well-defined rules and the employees should strictly adhere to them.

Only when the rules were not followed, the system would collapse and the world was now witnessing an economic meltdown on account of breaking of rules, Mr. Prasannakumar said.

This had also impacted India, though on a minor scale. The NLC had evolved well codified procedures for purchase, tender process and so on.

Mr. Prasannakumar said that vigilance mechanism had been put in place not only to fight against corruption but also conduct inquiry into complaints of fraud, negligence and misappropriations.

Everyone who had authentic facts on hand had the right to complain, Mr. Prasannakumar said.

He stressed the importance of internal audit that could pinpoint weak areas. He called upon the employees to adopt “zero tolerance” towards corruption.

V. Narayanan, Chief Vigilance Officer, NLC, said that in every section, there were 10 per cent of hardcore honest persons and another 10 per cent of hardcore dishonest persons.

The remaining 80 per cent were cat on the wall and the concern of the vigilance section was to keep a tab on them.

V. Sethuraman, Director (Power), P. Babu Rao, Director (Personnel), B. Surender Mohan, Director (Mines), also spoke.

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