The Chief Vigilance Officer

In one line

Every Ministry and every public sector body has an officer whose job is vigilance, who is the Commission's eyes inside a department it cannot enter, and who reports both to the Commission and to the head of the very organisation he is watching.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Chief Vigilance Officer is not created by the Central Vigilance Commission Act 2003; the office rests on executive instructions traceable to the Government's Resolution of 11 February 1964 that set up the Commission on the Santhanam Committee's recommendation, and it is the machinery through which the Commission exercises the superintendence over vigilance administration conferred by section 8(1)(h), obtains the reports, returns and statements it calls for under section 18, and receives the material on which it advises under section 17.

Why there has to be such an officer

Chapter 630 established what the Commission is: three people at a headquarters in Delhi, with no police force, no field establishment and no power to enter a Ministry.

Chapter 660 established what it must produce: an annual report to Parliament on vigilance and anti-corruption work across the whole of the Union Government and the public sector.

Between the two there is a gap, and the Chief Vigilance Officer fills it. He is a serving officer of the organisation, ordinarily of a senior rank, designated to handle its vigilance work; and he is, in the Commission's own long-used phrase, an extension of the Commission within the organisation.

The statutory hooks, and they are hooks and not a foundation. The Act never uses the words "Chief Vigilance Officer". What it does is:

section 8(1)(h), superintendence over the vigilance administration of Ministries and public sector bodies, which presupposes that each has one;

section 18, the power to call for reports, returns and statements to exercise general supervision over vigilance and anti-corruption work, which is what the officer supplies;

section 19, consultation before the Government makes vigilance or disciplinary rules, which are the rules the officer administers.

Say this plainly in an answer, because it is the point an examiner is testing. The whole working machinery of vigilance in India sits on executive instructions, and only its supervision sits in a statute. That is the reverse of what a student expects, and it is the reason a Chief Vigilance Officer's position is as weak as the next section shows.

What the office actually does

Preventive vigilance. Studying the procedures of the organisation where corruption is likely: purchase, contract, recruitment, licensing, inspection. Identifying the sensitive posts and having officers rotated out of them. Reviewing rules that leave too much discretion undefined. The Commission has said for decades that this is the larger half of the job and the half that is neglected.