Governance Now Sept 1-15
And paid a heavy price for exposing wrongdoings in the intelligence agency
So far you have heard or read of the ones who blew the whistle on corruption in various government schemes or projects. But here is a whistle-blower with a difference. Vinay Kumar Mittal blew the whistle on one of our premier intelligence agencies – the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), a technical intelligence agency to provide early warnings about evolving threats, which was set up in the aftermath of intelligence failure in Kargil.
The NTRO has been in the news in recent months for all the wrong reasons – tapping phones of political leaders, buying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) worth Rs 450 crore which are now lying as junk, buying satellite communication system from a blacklisted foreign company, compromising communication security, irregularities in recruitment of more than 100 personnel and misuse of official positions and secret service funds and so on. Much of it is largely due to this upright spy’s relentless drive to expose its wrongdoings.
Here is something unique about his endeavour. All our intelligence agencies work outside public scrutiny and institutional oversight, even that of parliament, and are not subject to auditing of their accounts by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). In a first of its kind exercise, the CAG carried out a special audit and confirmed the irregularities Mittal pointed out. In reply to an RTI (right to information) query from him, the CAG, on June 28, said: “Audit team has noticed various irregularities in appointments of employees and procurements by NTRO.”
The CAG’s report was submitted to the PMO in February this year. It was marked ‘top secret’ and is yet to be tabled in parliament. The PMO though has ordered a probe into NTRO’s affairs, a task entrusted to Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief Sanjeev Tripathi.
Of course, he had to pay a price. He was repeatedly humiliated, eventually leading to his premature retirement in 2008, seven years ahead of time. Threats and physical intimidations have been routine. But then who says it is easy to take on an intelligence agency directly controlled by the PMO? But the spy fights on. The battlefield has now shifted to the supreme court where his petition seeking to make the CAG report public, among other things, is pending.
***
Mittal comes across as a proud and unruffled man. Sitting in his Ghaziabad home, he recalls the heady early days of the NTRO. Back in 2003, it used to be called the National Technical Facility Organisation (NTFO) and he was one of the five founding members (along with the first chairman R S Bedi) who developed the organisation’s vision documents. There was no place to sit and no time to sleep. The team worked from the corridor of a hired building with borrowed furniture. He formally joined the NTRO as centre director (in joint secretary scale) of the Centre for Communication Application in February 2005, nearly a year after the NTFO was formally rechristened and notified as NTRO. Earlier, he had worked as a scientist in the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and RAW, dealing with communication, across platforms and technologies.
Mittal says things started falling apart after July 2006, when Bedi retired and KVSS Prasad Rao took over as chairman. This saw the entry of M S Vijayaraghavan, a former DRDO scientist, as advisor. “Rao was a decent man but ineffective. He was like prime minister Manmohan Singh under whom Vijayaraghavan grew up to become A Raja,” he says, indicating that it was Vijayaraghavan who created much of the mess in the NTRO.
He couldn’t help questioning and protesting against many of the irregularities he found in the new regime but it was the UAV deal that finally led to his premature retirement.
The deal had been signed with an Israeli firm in late 2006 with the approval of the cabinet committee on security (CCS). In March 2007, Mittal noticed three disturbing developments: the Israeli firm was behind the schedule, there were deviations in systems specifications but payments were being released by NTRO.
Things came to such a pass that though he was found to be right in his objections, he was eased out of the project and was replaced with a junior. Later, he was issued a reprimand for objecting too much. When he protested, the chairman rebuked him: “You’re very rigid and uncompromising. You’ve to be flexible.”
Then came the final straw. In May 2008, Vijayaraghavan called up Mittal’s deputies and asked them to report directly to him. And then, one fine day his official vehicle was withdrawn to complete his humiliation. He quit, seeking voluntary retirement. On October 1, 2008, he was relieved from service.
Things continued to go wrong on the UAV front. Sometime in late 2008 and the beginning of 2009, the NTRO placed additional orders for sensors on the UAVs at the cost of Rs 150 crore but without the CCS clearance, which should have been the case, from the same vendor. As the NTRO chairman had the power to sanction only up to Rs 20 crore, payments were made in small instalments.
Meanwhile, 26/11 happened and Mittal was recalled to the NTRO “with the assurance of full functional freedom” to implement the rest of the communication programmes he had conceptualised while preparing the NTRO’s vision documents. (This was his second recall, the first one being in July 2008, which lasted a day). He joined NTRO on July 13, 2009 but resigned a month later because, as he put it, “I was not happy with the mass scale corruption, violation of rules, favouritism and nepotism in NTRO.”
Thereafter, from September 2009, Mittal started filing RTI applications about the NTRO on recruitment, procurement, misuse of official positions and security violations. He also started writing to the CAG, prime minister, home minister, finance minister, central vigilance commissioner (CVC), CBI and anyone he could think of with the RTI replies he received.
Only the CAG responded in November 2009. The CAG, Vinod Rai, wrote to the then national security advisor (NSA) M K Narayanan seeking audit of the NTRO as the agency directly functioned under him.
The NSA first denied the permission, following which, Mittal says, Rai threatened to withdraw his (CAG’s) consent for exempting NTRO from auditing (which had been given in October 2004 as is the practice with exempted entities). The NSA consulted the prime minister and agreed for the audit.
The audit started in January 2010 and continued for a year. The report was submitted to the NSA in February this year.
In March 2011, Mittal went to the Delhi high court with the RTI replies because he had received no response from the authorities he had complained to with a view to fix accountability of the NTRO. That is when everything started coming into the public domain.
The high court, however, disposed of his petition by a neutral order, going by the government’s reply that the CAG had inquired into the NTRO affairs and that disciplinary action had been initiated against Vijayaraghavan and others.
But he was not satisfied. In the meanwhile, on June 28, he received a reply from the CAG confirming the irregularities. Emboldened, he approached the supreme court, praying that the CAG report be made public. “How else would the accountability be fixed? The CAG report has gone to the NSA under which it functions and it has not been tabled in parliament yet. So, I prayed that either the CAG report be tabled in parliament or be submitted to the court,” Mittal says.
On August 16, the apex court heard the matter and expressed its unhappiness at the manner in which the government and then the high court had dealt with the matter. It asked the government to file a fresh action taken report and the report of the inquiry committee the PMO had set up. Notices were issued to the PMO, NTRO and CVC to explain their positions and said it would take up the CAG report issue in its next hearing in mid-September.
“I am very happy with the court’s response. This is what I have been waiting for,” was how Mittal reacted to the development. Now he is waiting for the next hearing, hoping that his long fight will finally bear fruit. n
And paid a heavy price for exposing wrongdoings in the intelligence agency
So far you have heard or read of the ones who blew the whistle on corruption in various government schemes or projects. But here is a whistle-blower with a difference. Vinay Kumar Mittal blew the whistle on one of our premier intelligence agencies – the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), a technical intelligence agency to provide early warnings about evolving threats, which was set up in the aftermath of intelligence failure in Kargil.
The NTRO has been in the news in recent months for all the wrong reasons – tapping phones of political leaders, buying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) worth Rs 450 crore which are now lying as junk, buying satellite communication system from a blacklisted foreign company, compromising communication security, irregularities in recruitment of more than 100 personnel and misuse of official positions and secret service funds and so on. Much of it is largely due to this upright spy’s relentless drive to expose its wrongdoings.
Here is something unique about his endeavour. All our intelligence agencies work outside public scrutiny and institutional oversight, even that of parliament, and are not subject to auditing of their accounts by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). In a first of its kind exercise, the CAG carried out a special audit and confirmed the irregularities Mittal pointed out. In reply to an RTI (right to information) query from him, the CAG, on June 28, said: “Audit team has noticed various irregularities in appointments of employees and procurements by NTRO.”
The CAG’s report was submitted to the PMO in February this year. It was marked ‘top secret’ and is yet to be tabled in parliament. The PMO though has ordered a probe into NTRO’s affairs, a task entrusted to Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief Sanjeev Tripathi.
Of course, he had to pay a price. He was repeatedly humiliated, eventually leading to his premature retirement in 2008, seven years ahead of time. Threats and physical intimidations have been routine. But then who says it is easy to take on an intelligence agency directly controlled by the PMO? But the spy fights on. The battlefield has now shifted to the supreme court where his petition seeking to make the CAG report public, among other things, is pending.
***
Mittal comes across as a proud and unruffled man. Sitting in his Ghaziabad home, he recalls the heady early days of the NTRO. Back in 2003, it used to be called the National Technical Facility Organisation (NTFO) and he was one of the five founding members (along with the first chairman R S Bedi) who developed the organisation’s vision documents. There was no place to sit and no time to sleep. The team worked from the corridor of a hired building with borrowed furniture. He formally joined the NTRO as centre director (in joint secretary scale) of the Centre for Communication Application in February 2005, nearly a year after the NTFO was formally rechristened and notified as NTRO. Earlier, he had worked as a scientist in the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and RAW, dealing with communication, across platforms and technologies.
Mittal says things started falling apart after July 2006, when Bedi retired and KVSS Prasad Rao took over as chairman. This saw the entry of M S Vijayaraghavan, a former DRDO scientist, as advisor. “Rao was a decent man but ineffective. He was like prime minister Manmohan Singh under whom Vijayaraghavan grew up to become A Raja,” he says, indicating that it was Vijayaraghavan who created much of the mess in the NTRO.
He couldn’t help questioning and protesting against many of the irregularities he found in the new regime but it was the UAV deal that finally led to his premature retirement.
The deal had been signed with an Israeli firm in late 2006 with the approval of the cabinet committee on security (CCS). In March 2007, Mittal noticed three disturbing developments: the Israeli firm was behind the schedule, there were deviations in systems specifications but payments were being released by NTRO.
Things came to such a pass that though he was found to be right in his objections, he was eased out of the project and was replaced with a junior. Later, he was issued a reprimand for objecting too much. When he protested, the chairman rebuked him: “You’re very rigid and uncompromising. You’ve to be flexible.”
Then came the final straw. In May 2008, Vijayaraghavan called up Mittal’s deputies and asked them to report directly to him. And then, one fine day his official vehicle was withdrawn to complete his humiliation. He quit, seeking voluntary retirement. On October 1, 2008, he was relieved from service.
Things continued to go wrong on the UAV front. Sometime in late 2008 and the beginning of 2009, the NTRO placed additional orders for sensors on the UAVs at the cost of Rs 150 crore but without the CCS clearance, which should have been the case, from the same vendor. As the NTRO chairman had the power to sanction only up to Rs 20 crore, payments were made in small instalments.
Meanwhile, 26/11 happened and Mittal was recalled to the NTRO “with the assurance of full functional freedom” to implement the rest of the communication programmes he had conceptualised while preparing the NTRO’s vision documents. (This was his second recall, the first one being in July 2008, which lasted a day). He joined NTRO on July 13, 2009 but resigned a month later because, as he put it, “I was not happy with the mass scale corruption, violation of rules, favouritism and nepotism in NTRO.”
Thereafter, from September 2009, Mittal started filing RTI applications about the NTRO on recruitment, procurement, misuse of official positions and security violations. He also started writing to the CAG, prime minister, home minister, finance minister, central vigilance commissioner (CVC), CBI and anyone he could think of with the RTI replies he received.
Only the CAG responded in November 2009. The CAG, Vinod Rai, wrote to the then national security advisor (NSA) M K Narayanan seeking audit of the NTRO as the agency directly functioned under him.
The NSA first denied the permission, following which, Mittal says, Rai threatened to withdraw his (CAG’s) consent for exempting NTRO from auditing (which had been given in October 2004 as is the practice with exempted entities). The NSA consulted the prime minister and agreed for the audit.
The audit started in January 2010 and continued for a year. The report was submitted to the NSA in February this year.
In March 2011, Mittal went to the Delhi high court with the RTI replies because he had received no response from the authorities he had complained to with a view to fix accountability of the NTRO. That is when everything started coming into the public domain.
The high court, however, disposed of his petition by a neutral order, going by the government’s reply that the CAG had inquired into the NTRO affairs and that disciplinary action had been initiated against Vijayaraghavan and others.
But he was not satisfied. In the meanwhile, on June 28, he received a reply from the CAG confirming the irregularities. Emboldened, he approached the supreme court, praying that the CAG report be made public. “How else would the accountability be fixed? The CAG report has gone to the NSA under which it functions and it has not been tabled in parliament yet. So, I prayed that either the CAG report be tabled in parliament or be submitted to the court,” Mittal says.
On August 16, the apex court heard the matter and expressed its unhappiness at the manner in which the government and then the high court had dealt with the matter. It asked the government to file a fresh action taken report and the report of the inquiry committee the PMO had set up. Notices were issued to the PMO, NTRO and CVC to explain their positions and said it would take up the CAG report issue in its next hearing in mid-September.
“I am very happy with the court’s response. This is what I have been waiting for,” was how Mittal reacted to the development. Now he is waiting for the next hearing, hoping that his long fight will finally bear fruit. n
2 comments:
Thanks. What finally has happened to Vijayaraghavan?
Thanks. What finally has happened to Vijayaraghavan?
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