Vigilance Awareness Week is being celebrated from October 31 in Jammu and Kashmir alongside with the country.
As per the government several strategies have been adopted by the Government to fight corruption and to educate the general public about its perils.
Chief Secretary of JK has asked the Incharge Secretaries of the districts to intensively monitor the activities carried out under the Vigilance Awareness Week and sensitize the public about its importance during the public darbars they would hold in their concerned districts. He asked them to encourage the public to avail all the services right from their homes using digital platforms or DigiDost facility for removing the chances of corruption.
Observance of Vigilance Awareness Week remains one of the primary tools of preventive vigilance with the focus on building awareness and re-affirming the commitment of everyone to uphold integrity in public governance. Vigilance Awareness Week is observed every year to commemorate the birthday of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
The focus areas of the celebrations is to bring greater awareness on complaints under Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Informers and conduct Special Clearance Campaign for clearing all outstanding vigilance matters.
Many outreach programmes and activities have been planned regarding the preventive vigilance measures that are to be taken up as focus areas during the period
All employees are going to take the integrity pledges during this week besides highlighting the importance of Public Interest Disclosure & Protection of Informer Resolution, 2004 (PIDPI).
Also thousands of camps are going to be held across the districts from Panchayat level to raise awareness among the citizens to fight and root out the menace of corruption from the Jammu Kashmir.
Beyond doubt, corruption eats into the innards of a nation and is a debilitating social cancer which spares no one. There are numerous reasons, some of them well documented, as to why corruption flourishes. However, failure by some key institutions to bring to a close case plays an important part.
There are still FIRs registered under the Prevention of Corruption Act where challans have not been presented for years together.
There are timelines provided in legislation for the presentation of the charge sheet, otherwise, an accused is entitled to default bail. Any delay by the Investigating Agency in not completing investigation of the cases registered is seriously impacting the justice delivery system as the guilty are not being brought to court for trial even after decades of registration of cases against them.
The administration should ensure the monitoring system for investigations in these cases.
