By email [Friday, October 20, 2006  ]

Sir,

We find instances of shirking the responsibility, dereliction of duty, manipulations/relaxation of rules to earn a fast buck among persons in various organizations/walks of life. In a large number of cases the outcome is quite grave and telling on the social fabric. Mostly, when the situation has gone beyond the limit of finding a solution to rectify the situation, the process to identify the person on whom the guilt/responsibility/accountability could be ascribed, starts. By then the culprit would have moved to another position or would have retired. One Example is housing department having permitted unauthorized construction. The problem was revealed in gigantic proportions in Delhi when unauthorized constructions were taken up for demolition. A trend has emerged in the political arena, of the party in power looking for excuses to implicate the predecessors into some legal tangle, purely for political gains.

The need is to override the selfish motive of fixing the blame to find a scapegoat. However, when a genuine culprit has been identified to have taken advantage of the system for personal gains, he should be brought to book, no matter how much time has lapsed and no matter whether he is retired or is presently not in the same occupation. He must be made to cough up all that he had gained, in addition to being awarded a suitable punishment.