The Centre has decided that from now on even senior officials of the rank of Joint Secretary and above will not be allowed to take home sensitive files from the North Block.
Earlier, officials of the rank of Joint Secretary and above were allowed to take the files from the Ministry to their homes.
This decision comes in the wake of the one-man enquiry committee of the Home Ministry failing to retrieve the missing files relating to the Ishrat Jahan case and the CBI arresting an Under Secretary in the Union Home Ministry for allegedly running an extortion racket.
Under Secretary Anand Joshi was booked by the CBI for unauthorisedly taking away files from the North Block to his home and allegedly misusing them for extorting money from certain NGOs that had received a significant amount of foreign contribution. later on, the agency arrested Joshi.
Joshi in turn has accused his superior BK Prasad, who incidentally heads the enquiry committee to trace the missing Ishrat Jahan files, of pressurising him to give a clean chit to certain NGOs, including
Ford Foundation which were under scrutiny for Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act norm violations.
Following the incident, the Intelligence Bureau sent a communication to the Prime Minister’s Office advising that nobody, including senior officials of the Ministry, should be allowed to take sensitive files out from the Ministry.
In its report to the Government, the IB suggested that this can effectively plug loopholes in the movement of sensitive files and leakage of data from them. Once the file is out of the Ministry, the contents can either be photocopied or photographed through smartphones and transmitted to undesirable persons.
Concurrently, the Ministry has also undertaken a massive measure to organise files and weed out unnecessary ones. The move coincides with the Government’s celebration of two years in office including the Swachchh Bharat Mission.
“Cleanliness is not limited to its literal sense of the term but also entails cleaning up the mess that lies in the form of loopholes in the system that allows corruption to breed. leakage of sensitive files and data from the Ministry is a matter of serious concern and measures are being taken to check unauthorised access to such files or any misuse thereof,” an official said.
The Government took the decision swiftly as the missing files of the Ishrat Jahan case are yet to be traced and the alleged extortion racket being run from the North Block was viewed seriously as it (North Block) not only houses the office of Home Minister Rajnath Singh but also the offices of Directors of Intelligence Bureau and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).