Rampant corruption in Uttar Pradesh’s government, says report

LUCKNOW - Corruption was rampant in as many as 68 departments of the Uttar Pradesh government, the latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has revealed.

According to the report, a total of 17,429 cases of glaring financial irregularities were detected over a period of two years.

Interestingly, all that the administration has done was to order perfunctory inquiries which lay ensnarled at different levels in the government.

The report points out that the highest number of 8,705 cases of financial bungling were detected in the department of energy, followed by the housing sector, where 4,974 such cases were pending.

Among the other departments with a high corruption graph in the CAG report were public works, agriculture, animal husbandry, sugarcane and sugar industries, irrigation, industrial development, social welfare, womens welfare, food and civil supplies, tourism, urban development, cooperatives, handloom and ayurvedic and unani medicine, says the report.

Sources in the state finance department alleged that cases of corruption were invariably shielded by top functionaries in successive governments. Any time some upright officer musters up the courage to rake up these cases, he is shown the door, with the result that the cases have been piling up, remarked an official requesting he not be identified.

People at the top were rarely interested in initiating action against the corrupt; and interestingly, even as political masters vary in their ideologies and had nothing in common, their attitude in dealing with corruption remains uniformly passive, he said.