Himachal Pradesh mulls setting up professional investigating agency

By: Ravinder Makhaik

Shimla: To have a professional cadre for investigation purposes, the Himachal government is exploring the possibility of creating a separate wing out of personnel from vigilance and CID wings, chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal stated.

Presiding over a review meet of vigilance department on Tuesday, the chief minister said with a change in investigation methods, a need had surfaced to create a separate cadre of investigating officers in the state police.

The government would explore the possibilities by identifying capable police personnel to take over responsibilities of vigilance and CID enquiries, who could work high degree of professionalism and achieve the task bringing all registered cases to a logical conclusion so that justice is delivered to the satisfaction of aggrieved parties.

The chief minister directed the finance department to refrain other department from inviting purchase quotations in the last two months of the financial year. Purchases. generally made at the end of the financial year draw suspicions and many cases of mis-utilisation of the public funds have come to the notice of the government, he said.

He asked all departments to pay the bills of private parties through electronic banking mode by depositing their payments directly into their accounts so that there was no pilferage and corruption could be checked.

The state was committed to provide people responsive, transparent, efficient and corruption free administration, he said and asked people to support initiatives in booking corrupt elements so that they could be punished as per law.

Chief secretary Asha Swaroop, underlined the need for fixing a time frame for delivering service to the people and best use of the information technology be made to achieve the objective.

“Entire land record was likely to be computerised in coming couple of months and e-services made available to the public on demand, she said.

DS Minhas, DGP vigilance said that all departments needed to be assigned duties to its vigilance officers and identify the sensitive posts and doubtful employees so that vigil could be kept.