SC notice to centre on PIL challenging PCA changes

The Supreme Court on Monday issued a notice to the Centre on a public interest litigation that challenged two recent changes made in the Prevention of Corruption Act. The amendments had done away with the offence of criminal misconduct, if a public servant gave some pecuniary benefits to anyone in his official capacity, while the second reintroduced sanction for probing allegations against public servants.

Arguing for NGO CPIL, advocate Prashant Bhushan contended before a bench of CJI Ranjan Gogoi and justice Ajay Rastogi that the amendments had made the PCA ineffective. However, the CJI said Section 17A (1), which made prior permission a must for probing a bureaucrat, was not the same as Section 6A struck down by the SC earlier. Nonetheless, the CJI issued notices to the Centre to respond to the petition within six weeks.

The CPIL also challenged the move to do away with Section 13(1)(d)(ii)(criminal misconduct) from the Prevention of Corruption Act, which made it an offence for a public servant to abuse his position and thereby give pecuniary or any other advantage to anyone.


“This provision has been used in most prosecutions of public servants under the PC Act where there may not be a charge of directly accepting bribes. Such instances are like the prosecution of officials in the coal scam where officials gave leases to companies who they knew were not eligible,” the petitioner contended.

The amendments have rendered the PC Act almost ineffective by completely diluting the scope of some of the original provisions, by deleting some of the earlier offences and also by introducing new provision, the PIL said. In effect it would protect corrupt officials and exponentially increase level of corruption, it contended. The petition alleged that the amendment would curtail investigation against corrupt officials on the threshold and was the third attempt by the government to introduce a provision which was struck down twice by the Supreme Court.