Vinod Rai - CAG of India

CAG of India

Rai is among that rare breed of civil servants who know how to get work done in the government. A former colleague says Rai has an uncanny ability to cut through red tape. He was appointed as Comptroller and Auditor General of India with the backing of finance minister P. Chidambaram. But he has served up uncomfortable audit reports that have pinned many government departments beyond the baseline.

He has consistently hit the headlines for his unforgiving audits, ranging from the scathing report on the shoddy preparation for the Commonwealth Games to the latest on spectrum allocations for second generation (2G) telecom services.

Bureaucratic grapevine suggests there was quite a bit of pressure on Rai to dilute the 2G report but he held fast, merely asking his people to check for unnecessarily harsh or unfair language.

Along with a vibrant media, an activist Supreme Court and an increasingly vociferous civil society, his supporters say, Rai has made his office into a powerful force for accountability and transparency in modern India. Vinod Rai was the first of 30 Indian CAGs, who will be remembered for showing that the government and politicians can be made accountable, if statutory bodies simply do their job. He turned CAG into a pugnacious watchdog of good governance and administrative integrity at a time when India was experiencing the need for greater transparency and a rebalancing of power that has tilted over the years towards the executive. His term as CAG also coincided with the resurgence of the civil society movement against corruption and a call for a change in the governance structure in the country.