Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Thank God, CBI, ED & I-T don’t have Ninja bureaucrats as yet

AS over-armed federal officials in US are increasing getting flak from critics for using military tactics even for routine financial probes, their Indian counterparts are still miles away from taking an aggressive Ninja style. When former Jharkhand chief minister Madhu Koda, now in jail, was raided and questioned, Income Tax sleuths called him “sir” rather than…
Mr Koda. And according to reports, CBI officials were highly polite in refusing former telecom secretary Siddhartha Behura’s plea to delay his arrest on the ground of his wife’s illness. Compare these with some of the US case studies recently highlighted by Deroy Murdock, a columnist and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.
In a write-up appeared in Boston Herald, Murdock mentioned how from food-safety cases to mundane financial matters, “battle-ready public employees are turning America into the United States of SWAT.” These Ninja bureaucrats “deploy weapons against harmless, frequently innocent, Americans who typically are accused of nonviolent civil or administrative violations,” he wrote.
The classic example given in the same report is that of one man from California whose estranged wife is a suspect in one financial-aid fraud. The man was shocked when US Department of Education SWAT force burst into his house and put him in handcuffs in a patrol car for six hours. Understandably, his three kids, then aged 3, 7, and 11, were traumatized witnessing the entire saga. His estranged wife had left the house a year ago, and the huge armed force found no clue about the swindled scholarship money.
The critics in US however concede that the FBI agents and US Marshals need to be well-fortified. But they say, the problems have arisen as armed officers have begun to populate other agencies like National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Postal Inspection Service, Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs, Departments of Health and Human Services, Fish and Wildlife Service etc.
Thank God, India is yet to have investigating wings in the department of animal husbandry or ministry of heavy industries?

Action and Appointments
a) Shyam S Agarwal, a 1980 batch Rajasthan cadre IAS, presently secretary in National Commission for Scheduled Castes, has been appointed as secretary, National Disaster Management Authority in the rank and pay of additional secretary.

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