CAG blames PMO for not acting against Kalmadi

There could be more trouble in the offing for the Prime Minister’s Office on assorted corruption charges. The final report of the Comptroller and Auditor General into the Commonwealth Games has laid the blame for continuing with Suresh Kalmadi as the chief of the CWG Organising Committee on the PMO. The CAG report is expected to be tabled in Parliament in the next session.

The apportioning of the final responsibility has become such a polarising subject that it has split the opinion among the two agencies probing the conduct of the Games. The CAG report makes out with evidence that there is a clear mistake by the PMO in not removing Kalmadi well in time. But using the same documents, the two-member VK Shunglu committee has remained silent on the issue.

Last week, media reports — confirmed by the CAG office and sources close to the Shunglu committee — said the latter has recommended recasting the former’s office into a multi-member one.

The key set of evidence used by both auditors is the series of communications between successive sports ministers in the Union Cabinet, including the late Sunil Dutt, and the PMO about the slow pace of work by the organising committee (headed by Kalmadi), among other slip-ups. The ministers had apparently even recommended handing over of the job to other agencies. But South Block did not take any demonstrable action to meet those criticisms. Subsequent sports ministers — including trenchant critic of the Games, Mani Shanker Aiyar and more recently MS Gill — had also said they were uncomfortable with the quality and pace of the work for the Games.

The CAG report has used these communications and other materials to establish that the problems in the management of the Games could have been avoided if the PMO had taken cognisance.

It was only about a couple of months before the Games began that the Manmohan Singh government appointed a special committee headed by the cabinet secretary to do the firefighting.

In its latest report (yet to be made public), the Shunglu committee has soft-pedalled these criticisms and instead laid the blame for the sins of omission and commission on assorted departments and the state government of Delhi. The CAG report, therefore, makes out the case that if the PMO had responded with alacrity, the compounding of goof-ups by the organising committee in general and Kalmadi in particular could have been avoided.

In the various reports of the agencies probing graft charges in cases as diverse as the 2G spectrum allocation or the Adarsh Housing Society scam, the role of the PMO has not come up directly. But the Games probe by the CAG has made out a more culpable role for Singh’s office that could be difficult for it to shrug off.

The report by India’s top auditor also lays out the various grounds on which the organising committee can be prosecuted. Some of those have also been noted by the Shunglu committee too, which the government has said it is already working on.

In response to a query by FE, a CAG spokesperson said the report is ready and will be tabled in Parliament. He refused to comment on the contents of the report. He said the delay in tabling the report occured because most of the departments took more than the usual time to respond.