New CBI director sets agency up for a corporate style image makeover

The investigative agency is drawing up blueprints to incorporate Enterprise Risk Plan -- an exercise undertaken by CEOs to minimise risk

On January 1, Anil Sinha, the new Director of the Central Investigation Bureau, gave a 40-minute “inspirational” speech to all his officials, setting the direction for the next two years of his tenure.

The Supreme Court had called the CBI a “caged parrot” of the government when Anil Sinha’s predecessor, Ranjit Sinha, was heading it. Another CBI head had been charged with helping crony businessmen. Sinha is on the path of an image make-over, plus a reordering of the body.

The agency is preparing a plan incorporating an Enterprise Resource Plan programme, a forward-looking exercise often undertaken by chief executives of corporate houses to minimise the risk element. All officers will be encouraged to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for the organisation and their own role in it.

Sinha told officers he was reconciled to spending no time with his family at all over the next two years and that he’d told his family as much.

“The speech was impressive. He told all of us that the CBI should not be seen only as a premier investigative agency of the country but that of the world. We need to compete with the likes of agencies such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and that is where he has set the new bar for the agency,” said an official, who was present at the meeting.

The CBI was told to work fearlessly, to go into an investigation without a mindset and the ultimate motive should be to satisfy the courts.

This comes at a time when the agency is under scrutiny in the courts in many high-profile cases. Its sleuths have already drawn criticism in the Sohrabuddin encounter case, in which Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah was discharged as an accused recently by the Bombay High Court. Even the duration of the CBI counsel’s argument in the court was a parameter in the judgment passed by critics.

Sources said agency officials in Mumbai were examining the court’s order and Sinha would be guided by his investigators in deciding whether an appeal should be filed. All eyes are also on how the CBI proceeds in the Hindalco coal block case, in which the agency is set to quiz former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the orders of the trial court. It had quashed the agency’s closure report in the case last month and ordered for examining Singh, who held additional charge of the coal ministry when the alleged scam took place, along with other former officials of the PM’s office.