The Corruption Cleaner: CAG Head Vinod Rai

Who is Vinod Rai?

Vinod Rai, a 1972-batch Kerala cadre IAS officer, became the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in January 2008 — an office that had historically produced dry reports read by few and feared by none. By 2011, Rai had changed that. A string of unforgiving audit reports had made the 62-year-old auditor the most discussed — and most pressured — civil servant in the country.

What made the 2G report explosive?

The centerpiece was the CAG's November 2010 report on second-generation (2G) telecom spectrum allocation. It found that spectrum — a scarce, valuable national resource — had been given away at 2001 prices in 2008, in a process the report described as arbitrary and lacking transparency. The headline number: a presumptive loss to the exchequer of up to Rs 1.76 lakh crore.

The fallout was immediate and enormous. Telecom minister Andimuthu Raja had already resigned in November 2010. The report stalled the Winter Session of Parliament in a standoff over a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe, and it fed directly into the anticorruption ferment of 2011 — the Anna Hazare movement, the 2G court cases, and a national mood that treated graft as the defining political issue. Before the 2G report, there had been the scathing CAG audit of the shoddy preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

Did Rai face pressure to soften the reports?

By all accounts, yes — and that is a large part of why he became a folk hero. The bureaucratic grapevine in Delhi was thick with stories of pressure on Rai to dilute the 2G findings; he held fast, asking his team only to check for language that was unnecessarily harsh or unfair rather than change the substance. Forbes India named him its Person of the Year for 2010, an extraordinary honor for an auditor.

Rai's own account of his craft was less heroic than professional: an auditor's duty is to give the correct advice and the honest report, however unpleasant, to whoever is in power. In a year when Indian institutions looked compromised from every angle, one man with a calculator became the symbol of the institution that still worked.