The cases drag, the investigations stretch and even as the Central Bureau of Investigation battles fatigue and criticism alongside manpower shortage, the government is unwilling to provide more hands to the countrys premier investigating agency.
The agency has over 1,200 cases besides pending cases in its kitty and suffers from a 17 per cent short fall of manpower. Pleas to increase staff strength made to the PMO and the Department of Personnel and Training, under which the ministry falls, have fallen on deaf ears.
Several proposals, including one in which the agency sought to appoint investigators and technical staff on contract basis did not find favour.
The agency is facing nearly a 30 per cent shortage of investigating officers, says CBI director Uma Shankar Misra.
They dont want to fill the vacancies. This is babudom, concurs a senior official. The agency needs to fill nearly 96 technical-level vacancies and an additional 76 law officers to reach its authorised strength of 230.
No wonder we never get anywhere with our court cases, says an officer. Attempts to harness outside talent as software personnel, computer programmers and hackers on a contractual arrangement have also been scuttled despite assurances of exhaustive background verification.
We can hire the best IT minds but the government feels that taking on outsiders will set a bad precedent and compromise secrecy. But like the other intelligence agencies, we work on a need-to-know basis. So how can secrecy be compromised? asks a senior CBI official.
The other glaring shortfall is at the other ranks (OR) level and at the investigating officer (IO) level. There are 1,000 IOs, less by 589 IOs and over 1,900 ORs short by a minimum of 200 ORs.
Apart from the regular anti-corruption cases, the agency handles high profile special cases like the Taj corridor scam involving politicians like BSP leader Mayawati or economic offences like the Rs 30,000 crore Telgi scam.
With the latter, because of limited resources, the agency asked for only those fake stamp paper cases that had inter-state and national security ramifications.
However it was given 48 cases by the Supreme Court and the rest by state governments making it a total of 64 cases, despite the fact that most of the states police were half way through their investigation.
When the CBI made its paucity known, all it got was an additional sanction of one joint director, one DIG and SP each whereas the agency was looking for more investigating officers of the rank of DSPs and inspectors.
We toil with less hands. We are criticised for poor performance but no one is ready to listen to our problems, says an agency official.
A look at the numbers
Strength of CBI - 4078;
Present strength: 3380 (as on April 2005)
Authorised strength vs existing vacancies
Director: 1-1
Special Director/ Additional Director: 3-1
Joint Director: 17-2
Deputy Inspector General: 40-8
Senior Superintendent of Police: 10-6
Superintendent of Police: 91-7
Additional Deputy Superintendent of Police: 75-12
Deputy Superintendent of Police: 240-61
Inspectors: 755-196
Senior Inspector: 381-146
Assistant Senior Inspector: 199-27
Head Constable: 459-31
Other Ranks: 1807-201
Technical officer: 155-96
Legal department: 230-76
Case history
The CBI gets its cases from the Supreme court, various High courts, Central government and even State governments. Number of officials deployed on a case depends primarily on the size of the case.
The big cases are: Telgi scam - 64 cases
Defence purchases - 38 cases
Tehelka - 8 cases
Wildlife - 10 cases
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