Business
Standard: New Delhi: Sunday, 22 February 2015.
The corporate
espionage scandal is a result of callous administrative approach and
non-compliance of standard operating procedures in government offices dealing
with sensitive and secret matters, according to former bureaucrats.
Some of them
criticised the way secret matters were being dealt.
"There
have been government's instructions on dealing with sensitive and classified
informations. There are standard operating procedures too. In this incident, it
seems someone at some level has been callous," Former Cabinet Secretary T
S R Subramanian said.
Former IAS
officer E A S Sarma criticised the procedure of unnecessary classifying
documents as "secret" or "classified".
"There
is a habit of unnecessarily classifying every document as secret or classified.
Whereas, in the process the actual secret documents lost importance. There has
to be a proper segregation of documents.
"Sensitive
ministries like Defence and Petroleum must have a strict security system to
deal with visitors and secret files," he told PTI.
Sarma, who
has been a former secretary of Power and Finance ministries, said that
government departments should suo motu disclose governance details in public
domain as mandated under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
"Central
government ministries should put up all the details in public domain. For
Petroleum Ministry, production sharing contracts and minutes of the management
committee meetings and other things must be put in public. So that there is
transparency," he said suggesting that this may also put an end to
incidents of corporate espionage.
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