Babus are rather reluctant when it comes to submitting details of their immovable assets to the government even if it is a mandatory requirement. All civil services officers have to submit immovable property returns (IPRs) of a year by January-end of the following year, failing which their promotion and empanelment can be denied. The officials are also required to give details of their assets and liabilities to the government. A look at the number of babus who have failed to declare asset details, every year, reveals that this is one rule they’d be happy to ignore! This year, 1,856 IAS officers have not submitted details of their fixed assets for 2016.
The Uttar Pradesh cadre has 255 defaulters, the highest number, followed by 153 from Rajasthan, 118 from Madhya Pradesh, 109 from West Bengal and 104 from Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre. The number of defaulters seems to grow every year. This year’s figure is up from 1,527 who have not submitted their IPRs for 2015. This should worry the department of personnel and training (DoPT), which comes directly under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charge!
Babus belief turns bitter
The conviction of former coal secretary H.C. Gupta in the “coal scam” cases is that rare occasion when a secretary-level bureaucrat has been successfully prosecuted, along with two others. The other bureaucrats are then joint secretary in the coal ministry K.S. Kropha and then director, coal allocation-I section of the ministry, K.C. Samaria. Though the babus have been granted bail to enable them to file appeals in the Delhi high court, there is an air of unease in babudom as everyone ponders the fallout of the conviction.
For many, it had become a test case to decide to what extent a babu should take the rap for taking decisions on competing commercial interests. Many have held that the coal block and 2G spectrum allocation cases are prime instances where netas have escaped by pinning the blame on the officials. The fear among babus also stems from the widely-held belief that Gupta was among the “clean” ones, and has been cornered on technical grounds. Last year, the Indian Administrative Service Association and many senior IAS officers openly vouched for Gupta’s honesty. But that belief is now, we are told, turning into bitterness.
