Kiran Kumar Reddy has no time to punish corrupt officials

HYDERABAD: The Kiran Kumar Reddy-led state government has been sitting on a whopping 400 cases of corruption and other irregularities that have been sent by the vigilance and enforcement department for immediate action over the last three years.
Sources in the General Administration Department said most of the cases deal with major corruption in the irrigation, revenue, municipal administration, mines and other departments involving collusion of state government officials with politicians and contractors."These are cases where the vigilance probe has established guilt on the part of the offenders and recommended civil and criminal action against them. The state is supposed to have taken the action and then send the Action Taken Report to the vigilance department. But till date, action has not been taken even on a single vigilance case," said the sources.
According to the sources, the vigilance and enforcement department sent for action 148 high-profile vigilance cases in 2011, 97 cases in 2012, 135 in 2013 till March and another 15 cases in April/May/June. "In almost all the cases, the vigilance department has recommended criminal action or departmental action or both against the guilty officials. However, not one case has been acted upon. Interestingly, all the cases that have been pending are during the tenure of chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy, who took over in November 2010," said the sources.
Apart from nearly 400 cases of Action Taken Reports pending on the part of the state government, the regime has also been sitting on other reports sent by the vigilance department. For instance, alert notes are sent to the state government by the vigilance department whenever the beginning of irregularities is noticed so that the same can be nipped in the bud. "197 such alert notes were sent in 2011, 176 in 2012 and 228 in 2013 but all of them are gathering dust," said the sources.
For example, during the last few weeks, the vigilance department sent alert notes on irregularities in the Amma Hastam scheme. "The state government is unable to take any action as the irregularities are happening as a result of collusion between government officials and outsiders who invariably are close to either a minister or the local MLA," the sources said.
However, it is not only the current chief minister who is to blame. It turns out that even his predecessors took no action on the vigilance cases sent to them. Before Kiran took over, nearly 2,966 action taken reports were pending from various departments on the reports issued by the vigilance department. Of these, 1,987 were pending for the last 3 to 12 years!
The departments which attracted the maximum reports were municipal administration and urban development, revenue, panchayat raj and rural development, irrigation and agriculture.