CAG Vinod Rai: An accountant who's calling government to account
Dinesh Rao
-18th
August 2012
CAG Vinod Rai: An accountant who’s calling government to account
NEW DELHI: He sports a wry smile, not confrontational, rather persuasive. Vinod Rai, the Comptroller & Auditor General of India, runs his eponymous office similarly. From the fifth-floor corner room of a Dholpur stone building off Delhi's Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, the 64-year-old has been cluster bombing the government with startling revelations and grave shortcomings on its own functioning, the latest being its improprieties in allocating coal blocks, and its overt generosity to GMR in an airport project and Reliance Power in a power plant.
The weight of the findings of the three reports — a collective loss of about Rs 2,20,000 crore to the exchequer, according to CAG — have deepened the animosity between the government and the national auditor, and put Rai and his office under the scanner like never before. "Unfortunately, CAG has a certain mandate under the Constitution," V Narayanasamy, minister of state in the Prime Minister's Office, said after the latest CAG reports were tabled in Parliament. "According to me, CAG is not following the mandate."
Previously, the national auditor under Rai had slammed the central government in the allocation of mobile telephone licences and spectrum, conduct of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, running of its flagship rural employment guarantee scheme and the spending by Reliance Industries in an oil block.
He (Rai) has worked in the finance ministry earlier and he knows what he is doing," adds TN Chaturvedi, a former CAG. "He has been correct in his approach, keeping with his general tenor. His job is to show a mirror to the government, which he has done, in keeping with the way he has been in his career." In many ways, Rai's dealing with the government complements his first serve — unwavering, steady and bouncy. Rai, a keen tennis enthusiast, moved from the finance ministry to take over as CAG in January 2008. He has changed the game by adding teeth to accountability.
A fundamental shift initiated by him was to examine issues of national import in an auditing framework. So, rather than simply conduct mere compliance and financial audits of 64,000 government entities, Rai has been increasingly gearing — and empowering — his 48,000-strong organisation toward more thematic audits. CAG's reports on coal and telecom are testimony to that thinking. "If I'm losing Rs 100 or Rs 1,000, it doesn't matter compared to the loss of Rs 2,500 crore," Rai told ET in May 2011. To bring about this realignment, one of Rai's first moves was to ban new recruitments in the clerical cadre. Instead, he focused on hires at the 'assistant audit officer' level, with a background in commerce, economics, finance or accounting, and 'audit officers' with proficiency in chartered accountancy.
"In many ways, Rai is a leader, not a manager who will look at the nuts and bolts (and miss the big picture)," Roy Mathrani, director-general of audit, central expenditure, a division of CAG, told ET in May 2011.
An avid trekker, Rai brings in a whiff of fresh mountain air to a tome of indecipherable data that seemed to get bogged down by the nitty gritty and often lost out on the big picture. "You won't want to read them. No parliamentarian reads them, and after I've sent them, even I won't read them," he quipped, with a special mention of the work his team is doing for social audits with what he calls the in-house 'Noddy' books. These are Enid Blyton's Noddysized 10-20 page hard covers that deal with the audits of social issues in a racy style, with pictures and blurbs sprinkled liberally.
Rai, a rare breed among civil servants, is well aware that in the corridors of power, simplification is the name of the game. And that is how he cuts through red tape. He's also empowered by the terms of his employment, which mandate a six-year term, till 2014, that can be cut short only by impeachment.
Thanks for reading
Dinesh Rao
Deputy general Manager( Finance)
BHEL/ISG
IISC post Mallleswaram
Bangalore 12
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