Gurugram: Go to a police station in parts of Haryana without money in pocket, and your FIR may never get registered. Walk into a revenue office to check land papers, and you might find someone has already altered them for a price.
These are complaints on official record with the Haryana Lokayukta, finding mention in its 142-page annual report for the year 2025-26 tabled Thursday in the Assembly.
Between April 2025 and March 2026, the anti-corruption ombudsman received 539 fresh complaints. By the time the year closed, 1,289 complaints were still pending, some of them old cases that simply refused to go away.
The development and panchayat department tops the list with 450 pending complaints, followed by the police at 250, revenue at 189, education at 100 and urban local bodies at 66.
The complaints against the police read almost like a checklist of everything that erodes public trust in the force: FIRs not registered, investigations that tilt toward whoever has the better connections, bribes demanded outright, and innocent people framed because someone influential wanted it that way.
Revenue offices fare no better in the Lokayukta’s report—land records tampered with, unauthorised persons allowed to sit and work inside government offices, bribery mixed with plain harassment, and quasi-judicial cases that drag on for years without resolution.
What makes the report stinging is its blunt assessment of the machinery meant to stop all this. There is, it says, no effective grievance-redressal system in these departments to begin with. And, wherever a Vigilance Cell technically exists, it is either doing nothing or has been compromised from within.
The Lokayukta recovered Rs 28.17 lakh in misappropriated public funds—Rs.19.82 lakh from sarpanches across various gram panchayats caught misusing panchayat money, and another Rs 8.35 lakh after an inquiry found someone drawing pension under a social welfare scheme despite being ineligible for it.
But, getting the government to act on what the Lokayukta actually recommends is another matter altogether, and this is where the report is damning.
Under the Haryana Lokayukta Act, departments are supposed to send an Action Taken Report (ATR) within three months of any recommendation.
As things stand, 170 such reports remain pending, for recommendations dating anywhere from 2017 to 2025—nearly a decade in some cases where the government is sitting on findings that its own ombudsman had already investigated and acted upon.
Not that the government is unaware of this backlog. In an explanatory memorandum attached to the report, Haryana chief secretary Anurag Rastogi acknowledged that several departments simply do not send ATRs within the required period, and, in many cases, never send them.
He noted that his office has issued repeated directions over the years to department heads, divisional and deputy commissioners, and university registrars to fall in line. He also pointed to a fresh circular dated 8 July, urging officials to act on the Lokayukta’s reports without further delay.
The Lokayukta has flagged a recurring problem of rural Haryana—land of panchayats and municipalities being encroached upon, often with little pushback from the administration.
Encroachment cases are not handled promptly, the report says, adding that there are instances where the police did not even step in to help clear the land.
Removal orders, once passed, are sometimes never carried out, while appeals against them can sit pending for years without response.
Then there is the demand the Lokayukta keeps making but has yet to get: give its own Police Wing the power to register FIRs and make arrests in corruption cases, the way such bodies function in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.
As things stand, Haryana’s Lokayukta can investigate, conclude and recommend, but cannot act on any of it.
The report calls this its single biggest handicap, and separately seeks a dedicated police station for its cases, along with three Sub-Inspectors, three Assistant Sub-Inspectors and six Head Constables to plug a chronic staff shortage.
Even the institution does not have a permanent building as of now. The foundation stone for a new Lokayukta Bhawan in Sector 1, Panchkula, was laid with some ceremony on 11 February. Six months later, construction is yet to begin. The tender has not even been floated.
Haryana Lokayukta Justice Hari Pal Verma (retired) put the larger problem in plain words in the report, dated 26 May: Haryana is not short of rules to fight corruption and maladministration.
He has asked for a zero-tolerance approach going forward. The Lokayukta urged the government to act on its recommendations in the public interest, rather than as another entry in a growing pile of pending files.
(Edited by Tony Rai)