By Dilip Cherian
If you thought turf wars in Delhi were messy, Tamil Nadu has just offered a tighter, sharper version: two authorities, one post, and zero clarity. In the middle of election-season churn triggered by the Election Commission of India, a new DGP took charge and promptly assigned additional charge of the DVAC to an IPS officer. Hours later, the Home Secretary stepped in and named someone else for the same role. Same day, same government, two orders.
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In theory, hierarchy should settle this. The DGP runs the police; the Home Secretary runs the administration. Files are supposed to move in a straight line. Here, they seem to have looped back on themselves.
Of course, the Election Commission’s earlier reshuffle had already scrambled the script—assigning and then effectively withdrawing the same charge. The DGP appears to have read the first memo; the Home Secretary has read the fine print. Less a clash of egos, more a duel of interpretations.
But this isn’t about clerical confusion. The DVAC isn’t just another department; it is the state’s anti-corruption nerve centre. Control over it is less about procedure and more about leverage.
We’ve seen this pattern before, especially around elections. Authority becomes elastic, procedure creative, and ambiguity… useful. Call it a turf war, a procedural glitch, or just administrative theatre. Either way, it’s a reminder: in the Indian state, ambiguity isn’t a bug. It’s often the feature.
The IAS exit dilemma
Quitting the IAS, we’re often told, is an act of courage. The popular imagination treats resignation like flipping a switch, but in some instances, it’s closer to filing a petition with a system that isn’t in a hurry to let you go.
Under the rules governing the All India Services, an IAS officer’s resignation is merely a “proposal” until the government accepts it. There is no fixed timeline for that acceptance. Which means you can resign and still technically remain in service for months, even years.
Before the Centre even looks at your request, the state cadre runs its own checks: pending dues, vigilance status, and disciplinary cases. If anything is hanging fire, the resignation can be rejected outright.
Even otherwise, the file travels a long arc, with the Prime Minister as the final authority in IAS cases.
If the government believes your departure is inconvenient or awkward, it can simply sit on the resignation or delay acceptance to ensure “administrative continuity”.
Kannan Gopinathan, whose resignation reportedly remained unaccepted for years, is in a strange limbo. He’s neither fully inside nor outside the system. Or Shah Faesal, who managed to return to service because his resignation hadn’t been formally accepted, turning bureaucratic delay into a legal loophole. There’s also a financial sting. Unlike voluntary retirement, resignation means forfeiting pension benefits altogether.
This raises an uncomfortable question: if the state can indefinitely delay your exit, is resignation really a right—or a permission slip? In a service designed to ensure continuity and neutrality, this asymmetry of power may be intentional. Governments don’t like uncertainty, and they like exits even less, especially from people who know where the files are buried.
So yes, getting into the IAS is famously difficult. Getting out, it turns out, can be even harder.
The real economy we don’t count
Every time a new corruption case breaks, the usual reaction is as if we’ve stumbled upon an exception. A bad apple. A rogue network. A system briefly derailed. Then the numbers arrive.
In the Subodh Agarwal case linked to the Jal Jeevan Mission, the figure hovers around Rs 900 crore and is climbing. That’s the headline number, but anyone who has watched how these things work knows the real economy of a scam is never fully itemised. Only what can be proven is counted. What moves is often much larger.
Because this isn’t smash-and-grab corruption. It’s engineered. Tenders tweaked, qualifications tailored, and approvals aligned. The money doesn’t vanish but often travels efficiently through a chain that looks suspiciously like governance, just with different beneficiaries.
And that’s where the discomfort lies. We keep calling these “scams,” as if they’re episodic disruptions. But stack them up across sectors, states, years, and a different picture emerges. Something systematic. Continuous. Almost predictable. At some point, we stop asking how a Rs 900 crore fraud happened and start asking how many such flows never make it to the headlines.
The irony is hard to miss. A scheme meant to deliver water ends up demonstrating liquidity of another kind. Funds move faster than pipes, and far more reliably. Villages wait for supply; the system doesn’t.
Which raises an awkward thought. Clearly, corruption isn’t a parallel economy lurking in the shadows but is deeply intertwined with the main one. Because if you take a step back, the pattern is hard to ignore.
The numbers, when aggregated, begin to look less like losses and more like an alternate GDP—unofficial, unaccounted, but very real.
And perhaps far larger than we’d like to admit.
