India's anti-corruption battle stalled by credibility gap, says ex-IB official
Former IB special director Yashovardhan Jha Azad says India's anti-corruption framework suffers not from a shortage of laws but from weak credibility, and proposes six tests to judge institutional performance.
India has no dearth of laws or institutions to combat corruption, but the system is undermined by weak credibility, independence, accountability and effectiveness, former Intelligence Bureau special director Yashovardhan Jha Azad has said.
Delivering the Venugopal Rao Memorial Oration at the Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad, Mr. Azad said decades of institution-building had not translated into a decisive victory against graft. Speaking on "How India Fights Corruption: The Institutional Criminology Test", he proposed six parameters to judge the credibility of anti-corruption bodies — independence, impartiality, competence, timelines, accountability and courage.
He traced the history of bribery across civilisations, citing Roman practices, ancient Indian texts and Chanakya's Arthashastra, which he said documents bribery and abuse of power in detail. He also pointed to Kashmiri writer Kshemendra and Kalhana's Rajatarangini as early Indian works dealing with corruption, hypocrisy, greed and the misuse of authority.
Turning to independent India, Mr. Azad described the 1948 Jeep scandal as one of the first major corruption cases. Subsequent scandals, he said, led to the Santhanam Committee, following which the Central Vigilance Commission and the Central Bureau of Investigation came into being in 1964-65.
"Seven decades of independence fighting corruption had resulted in laws, institutions, strengthened investigative agencies and technological capabilities on an unprecedented scale and yet the battle remains unfinished," he said.
Mr. Azad argued that the true cost of corruption is borne in everyday life — hospitals that are never built, roads laid below specification, bridges that collapse, and jobs that go to undeserving candidates while capable applicants are shut out. Contractors unable to compete on merit and honest officials whose integrity becomes a hurdle to their own advancement also pay a price, he added.
Citing Transparency International's 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, he said India scored 39 out of 100 and ranked 91st among 182 countries. Multiplying anti-corruption laws and organisations alone would not help, he said, stressing the need to reduce unnecessary discretion, strengthen the rule of law, improve transparency and let citizens hold governments to account.
He questioned whether an investigative agency can pursue a powerful person without weighing the consequences, and said that while there is extensive debate on how much authority the CBI, vigilance agencies, secretaries and senior police officers should wield, the capabilities of investigators themselves receive too little attention.
Citing Central Vigilance Commission data, he said that at the end of 2025, 2,447 anti-corruption cases had been pending for 10 to 20 years and 409 for more than two decades. He was critical of the Lokpal, noting that Parliament passed the law in 2013 but the institution became operational only in 2019.
Mr. Azad said he favours a simpler institutional architecture. He argued for reducing the number of anti-corruption bodies, giving the CBI clearly defined powers and functioning under parliamentary oversight, and applying similar principles to the Enforcement Directorate.