Anna Hazare believes that the long-awaited national institution to tackle corruption will help reduce the problem by 60 to 65 per cent. At a recent interaction with the media in Chennai he pointed out that he had never claimed that the creation of the Lok Pal would result in a 100 per cent eradication of the scourge. Indeed, even back in May he had estimated that the proposed anti-corruption ombudsman would curb graft by 60 to 70 per cent. According to him, such a decrease would be substantial enough, enabling “poor people to get justice.”
Certainly any significant reduction in the prevalence of what is widely perceived to be a cancerous epidemic threatening the health and well-being of citizens as well as the economy would be more than welcome. However, it is not clear what Hazare’s estimate is based on, in the apparent absence hitherto of any serious, systematic effort to evaluate the performance of existing anti-corruption agencies in the country.
In this context, fresh research by the Law, Governance and Development Initiative of the Azim Premji University (APU) in Bangalore provides useful insights into the functioning of the Lok Ayukta in Karnataka, widely regarded as a model to be emulated. The preliminary findings presented in a new working paper by Narayana A, Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Vikas Kumar suggest that the protracted, polarised and unnecessarily acrimonious debate that has dominated public discourse through much of this year may amount to barking up the wrong tree.
According to the authors, the debate so far has focused primarily on the policy framework and institutional design of the proposed Lok Pal, with inadequate discussion on the choice of criminal law as the sole means to the universally desired end.
Seeking to assess how this approach works in practice they examined a comprehensive data set of all the raid and trap cases taken up by the Karnataka Lok Ayukta over the last 16 years (1995-2011), accessed through the Right to Information Act. Their analysis suggests that any anti-corruption agency modelled on the Lok Ayukta in Karnataka is unlikely to achieve the objective of effectively tackling corruption unless lessons from this empirical experience are taken into account.
The need for a strong, pro-active, national agency to initiate criminal investigation against corrupt officials has been a key element of the ongoing Lok Pal debate. The Karnataka Lok Ayukta has long had the power to investigate cases of corruption and, in 2010, it was endowed with suo motu powers to initiate criminal investigation. However, between 1995 and 2011, the agency carried out just 357 suo motu raids against individual officials, even as it received and responded to over 2,159 complaints. Evidently, one of the most active Lok Ayuktas in the country is largely a private complaint-driven institution, with only one in six cases initiated by the agency.
While the legal power to initiate action may not necessarily result in a pro-active anti-corruption agency, institutional leadership does seem to play a significant role in determining performance. The APU study found that over 66 per cent of the raid cases in Karnataka were initiated between 2006 and 2011, when Justice Santosh Hegde was the Lok Ayukta.
The distinction between petty and grand corruption is among the contentious issues in the Lok Pal debate, surfacing in the form of differences of opinion on the inclusion of Group C and D officials within its jurisdiction. Nearly half of the officials against whom the Karnataka Lok Ayukta has proceeded belong to the lower bureaucratic levels. Only about 10 per cent are senior officials and, significantly, less than one per cent of these are from the elite IAS, IPS, IFS, and KAS cadres. Going by this experience, the case docket of a Lok Pal that includes officers of all categories is likely to be overwhelmed by cases against the lower bureaucracy, raising questions about the allocation of scarce prosecutorial resources.
The creation of a strong, independent investigation and prosecution arm has been central to the Lok Pal debate, with the question of whether or not the CBI should be brought under its ambit occupying centre-stage this week. Failure to complete investigations and refusal of sanction for prosecution have been identified by some as critical problems in this context. However, the Karnataka experience suggests that neither of these issues is a major stumbling block.
The APU study found that investigation had been completed in about four-fifths (80.5 per cent) of all trap cases and over half (52.2 per sent) of all raid cases. According to the researchers, this relatively high investigation rate is particularly remarkable considering that the cases pending investigation are, on an average, less than two years old.
Similarly, governmental sanction for prosecution does not appear to have obstructed the functioning of the Lok Ayukta in Karnataka: nearly 95 per cent of all trap cases and 90 per cent of all raid cases that were investigated received sanction for prosecution. Further, charge sheets were filed in over 97 per cent of the trap cases and over 95 per cent of raid cases that obtained sanction. According to the researchers, this processing rate compares favourably with that of criminal cases in general.
The real sticking point seems to emerge after the charge sheets are filed and cases enter the criminal justice system. Over 95 per cent of the trap and raid cases before the special designated court are still under trial. Cases take five to eight years, on an average, to go through the system. Only 16 cases have so far resulted in convictions, representing a conviction rate of 20 per cent of completed cases and an even smaller fraction of pending cases. According to the researchers this is much lower than the rate of convictions in criminal prosecutions in anti-corruption cases across the country in recent years, ranging between 34 and 40 per cent.
Clearly, then, the trial stage is the key hurdle in the path to the successful resolution of corruption cases. Yet this reality has received little attention in the continuing debate.
The author is an independent journalist and is based in Bangalore.
ammujo@gmail.com
