Aruna Roy moots Whistle Blowers' Act

Bangalore, DH News Service:

 
Presenting the Manjunath Shanmugam Integrity award for 2009 at the Indian Institute of Management here, Roy said “Till today we do not have a Whistle Blowers’ Act to protect government employees who show immense courage in exposing malpractices despite the threat of harassment from seniors.” She added that the Act was necessary to preserve the ‘transparency and accountability’ of the system and the fabric of society.

Roy said that there were lakhs of Indians like slain Manjunath Shanmugam fighting corruption in the system at the risk of their lives. “It is a huge struggle for people in and out of government, men and women and all Indians to maintain the idea of India enshrined in the Constitution,” she observed.

Awards presented

The award was conferred on three persons - Jitendra Chaturvedi of DEHAT, a voluntary organisation, Vinod Adhau, a revenue officer from Maharashtra and  Sanjiv Chaturvedi, a IFS officer from Haryana.

The award is named after Manjunath Shanmugam, an Indian Oil Corporation employee and an IIM alumnus who was brutally murdered for exposing an oil adulteration racket in Lakhmipur, Uttar Pradesh in 2005. A network of IIM alumni started a trust in the name of Manjunath and instituted the award for courage and integrity in public life, in the year 2006.

Although the award was given away to three individuals, the trust decided to give the cash reward of Rs one lakh to Jitendra Chaturvedi. Jitendra, an activist from Bahraich district on the Indo-Nepal border has been  fighting for the rights of the people of the district, who are still not considered citizens of India. “I am both honoured and privileged for conferring the award, particularly because I hail from the place where Manjunath fought to rid the system of corrupt practices,” an emotional Jitendra said.