New Delhi: As November 30 approaches, speculation is high regarding who will replace Mr Anil Sinha as CBI director. Two women officers being in the reckoning have made matters more interesting.
The women officers in the fray are Ms Archana Ramasundaram, the first female IPS officer to head a paramilitary organisation, the Sashtra Seema Bal, and Ms Meera Borwankar, director-general, Bureau of Police Research and Development.
With CBI’s two previous directors – Mr A.P. Singh and Mr Ranjit Sinha – caught in controversial maelstroms, the agency had lost a lot of sheen and lustre.
The agency is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons, after the recent suicides by senior bureaucrat B.K. Bansal, who was fighting a corruption taint in the Elder Pharma case, and his family, perceived to be due to pressure being exerted by the agency.
The appointment of the new CBI director against this backdrop makes it even more intriguing. And if a woman is named to head the agency, it will be a first.
Special director Rupak Kumar Dutta is the senior-most CBI officer in line for succession and the collegium may consider him for he is an insider who knows the systems and processes of the probe agency.
A 1981 batch IPS officer from the Karnataka cadre, Mr Dutta took over as special director in the CBI headquarters in July, 2015 after serving as additional director and looking after the anti corruption (HQ) zone, Patna, Hyderabad and Chennai zones, Economic Offences Zone-I, Bank Securities & Frauds and Delhi.
Before joining the CBI, he was DGP, CID, Special Units & Economic Offences in Karnataka. The buzz in the CBI is that two insiders never get the top job in succession, but that may well change this time.
Other eligible candidates include Delhi Police commissioner Alok Ver-ma, a 1979 batch IPS officer who is considered a no-nonsense, non-controversial and apolitical officer.
Mr Verma assumed charge when Delhi Police was in a confrontational mood with the AAP government under his predecessor B.S. Bassi. The panel is also likely to include Ms Rama-sundaram, a 1980 batch officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, who was earlier special director, National Crime Records Bureau.
The officer was in the news in 2014 for her appointment as CBI additional director which was challenged in the Supreme Court by the Tamil Nadu government. She was then moved to the NCRB as its chief. Ms Meera Borwankar, has also worked with Maharashtra’s elite Anti-Terrorism Squad.
Other contenders include Maharashtra DG Satish Mathur. Known as perhaps the first National Security Guard-trained 1981 batch IPS officer, Mr Mathur has held several crucial postings, including his tenure with the CBI when he was one of the officers who prosecuted the 1993 blast accused.
Mr Mathur was also director-general, Legal and Technical, the first person to hold the post after it was created by the state government to improve the conviction rate in Maharashtra.
