Law needs more bite to protect corporate whistleblowers

The Whistleblower Protection Act, 2011, must be amended to include protection to private enterprises, say lawyers in the light of the recent murder of V Venkateswarlu in the city.
The police department is working on a theory that Venkateswarlu had been killed because he was threatening to expose corruption within the publicly-listed `3,911-crore Kalpataru Power Transmission.
But given the current legal situation in India, lawyers theorise that Venkateswarlu could not have sought official help or intervention in this regard as the Whistleblower Act provides protection only to public servants or those working for NGOs who have a “public interest disclosure“ to make. “Private entities or corruption in private entities would not fall under the perview of the Whistleblowers' Act,“ said lawyer K Krishnaswamy .
In recent years, there have been a few murders that caught the limelight like that of Indian Oil Corp officer Shanmugham Manjunath, who was murdered for sealing a petrol pump that was selling adulterated fuel. His life was turned into the 2014 movie Manjunath.Another famous case is that of engineer Satyendra Dubey , who exposed graft in NHAI's Golden Quadrilateral project.
“Unless there is an element of public interest say someone is willfully misusing their power orand causing a loss to the government or there is a wrongful gain to a public servant it will not fall under the Act,“ lawyer V Rangachari said.
RTI activists, who file peti tions that are legitimately in the interests of the larger public, also don't qualify for protection under the Act. Many of the murders of activists seeking to expose corruption in the National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREGA) scam, for example, happened because both the Whistleblowers Act and the Right to Information Act, 2005 provide inadequate protection to those outside the bureaucracy , said lawyers.
As a publicly-listed company on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange, Kalpataru falls under the SEBI scanner (Securities and Exchange Board of India) and must disclose all its activities to the Registrar of Companies. “He could have asked for protection outside of the Act. He is perfectly entitled to legal help and protection from the government and police irrespective of whether he is a public servant or not,“ said former additional solicitor general of India P Wilson.