State Vigilance Commissions

In one line

Corruption is investigated by the State police in the States, and every State has built some vigilance machinery of its own, but none of it has the statutory footing the Central Vigilance Commission acquired in 2003, and in Maharashtra the anti-corruption work sits with a police wing while the statutory institution is the Lokayukta.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the label "Vigilance Commissions" is plural because vigilance is not a Union monopoly; by section 17 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988 the ordinary investigating officers for corruption offences outside the Delhi Special Police Establishment are officers of the State police of the ranks specified, and by section 63 of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013 every State was required to establish a Lokayukta by a law of its Legislature; the State vigilance commissions and anti-corruption bureaux that operate alongside them rest, like the Central Vigilance Commission before 2003, on executive resolutions and not on statute, and the Central Vigilance Commission Act 2003 does not extend to them.

Why the plural matters

Chapter 590 read section 1(2) of the Central Vigilance Commission Act 2003: it extends to the whole of India, and the Commission it creates has jurisdiction over Central Government servants and the Central public sector. It has no jurisdiction over a State Government servant, a State public sector undertaking or a municipality.

So a whole tier of Indian administration is outside the Act, and it is the tier a citizen actually meets: the tahsildar, the municipal engineer, the transport office, the State electricity board, the police station.

Who investigates corruption there. Section 17 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988 answers it. No police officer below the rank of an Inspector of Police in the case of the Delhi Special Police Establishment, of an Assistant Commissioner of Police in the metropolitan areas of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Ahmedabad and in any other notified metropolitan area, and of a Deputy Superintendent of Police or an officer of equivalent rank elsewhere, may investigate an offence under the Act without the order of a Magistrate or make an arrest without a warrant.

Read the section for what it assumes. It assumes that in every State outside the metropolitan areas a Deputy Superintendent of Police is the ordinary investigating officer for corruption. The State police, and not any commission, is the anti-corruption investigating agency in the States, and every State organises those officers into a wing, commonly called an Anti-Corruption Bureau or a Vigilance Department.

What a State vigilance commission is

The pattern follows the Centre's, one step behind. Chapter 570 showed how the Central Vigilance Commission was set up by a Resolution of 11 February 1964 on the Santhanam Committee's recommendation, and remained an executive body for thirty-nine years until the Act of 2003 gave it a statute.