Prime minister quizzed on corrupt officials

NEW DELHI - A spate of questions were put to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the Lok Sabha over the global notoriety of Indian government officials for being corrupt and inefficient — but he left it to a junior minister to reply Wednesday.

In recent years, five US firms bribed Indian officials, while a Hong Kong-based organisation ranked them as the least efficient among their counterparts in Asia, Minister of State (MoS) in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Prithviraj Chavan told the Lok Sabha in a written reply to questions posed to Singh.

The MoS for the PMO sometimes answers questions asked of the prime minister.

Quoting information received from the Indian ambassador to the US, Chavan told the house that five US firms have figured in American reports on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Anti-corruption Enforcement for 2008 and 2009 for bribing Indian officials of five union ministries and a state government.

He said the officials, who were bribed, belonged to central ministries of defence, railways, agriculture and finance and the state government of Maharashtra.

The five US firms which bribed these officials included Richard Morlok and Mario Covino, Pioneer Friction Ltd, York International Corporation, DE Nocil Crop Protection Ltd (subsidiary of Dow Chemicals, which took over Union Carbide Corporation linked to the Bhopal gas tragedy) and Pride International Inc, said Chavan.

“In view of the report on improper payment to a key official in Faridabad-based directorate of plant protection quarantine and storage by DE Nocil Crop Protection Ltd, a subsidiary of Dow Chemicals, the ministry of agriculture ordered a probe into the matter,” said Chavan.

The matter was later transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which registered a corruption case against agriculture ministry officials, Ratan Lal Rajak and Satyabroto Banerji, for accepting a bribe of $32,000 in 2007, said the minister.

He added that the two have already been sent up for trial before a special CBI court in Ambala in November 2009.

On the US reports, while the defence ministry has ordered a probe into the allegations, the railways ministry has suspended its dealing with US firm Webtec and its Indian subsidiary Pioneer Friction Limited.

In another reply, the minister said: “Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, after conducting a business survey, has ranked Indian bureaucracy as the least efficient among 12 Asian countries.”

Back home, a three-member panel, chaired by former Central vigilance Commissioner P.C. Hota, appointed by the government to suggest ways to tackle corruption in bureaucracy, has observed that corruption among government servants has been on a steady rise, said the minister, in reply to another question.