Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Vigilance raid exposes graft at village offices

Thiruvananthapuram: The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) on Monday conducted surprise inspections at 164 village offices across the State and said it detected “inexplicable” delays and “lack of transparency” in the issuing of land transaction forms, caste, income and nativity certificates, among other important documents.

Director General of Police, VACB, Desmond Netto and Additional Director General of Police Sankar Reddy ordered the anti-corruption alertness operation codenamed Operation Snake's Eye-II.

Eighty-four teams of anti-corruption investigators inspected the offices in the presence of independent government witnesses. They found that most village offices maintained their registers shoddily.

For instance, office documents showed only the date the certificates had been issued to applicants and not when they had submitted their requests.

Investigators found hundreds of pending applications at the offices. But none of the applications had been registered in any official record.

Officials said this pointed to a well entrenched system of corruption, possibly involving a network of touts, in the processing and issuing of certificates and attestations at the village office level in the State.

Revenue recovery

Investigators found corrupt village officials often deliberately delayed the issuing of Revenue Recovery notices to tax defaulters to favour those who paid them bribe.

They also found that village officials had been overcharging citizens who had applied for fresh election identity cards after they lost their original ones.

Some village offices, mainly those in the hilly Idukki district, were found to be storing large amounts of cash that should have been ideally deposited in the nearest government Treasury or the branch of a nationalised bank.

Since, such most village offices lacked night watchmen and strong rooms, the officials took the public money home.

Some of them possibly diverted the money temporarily for their private gain.

The VACB found that corrupt officials, when they entered their office, often declared more cash than what they actually carried to explain the bribe they would get during the course of their day's work.

The VACB said it would register cases, recommend departmental action and suggest measures to check corruption when the nearly 200 inspections reports are finalised.

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