Case studies

Story hook

In June 2010, the Director of the Spectrum Management division of the Department of Telecommunications signed a file approving a ₹1,651-crore spectrum allotment to a private telecom company. Six months earlier, his son had been hired as a senior executive at the same company on a salary three times the going market rate. The Director had filed no disclosure with his Vigilance Officer. The file moved. The spectrum was allotted. Twelve years later, the Supreme Court's 2G Spectrum judgement (Centre for Public Interest Litigation v Union of India, 2012) cancelled the allocation, naming the Director as one of fifteen officials with "undisclosed personal interests."

A father's pride became a constitutional crime. The Director had broken no traffic law, taken no cash bribe, met no minister in a hotel room. He had merely failed to declare that his son's employer was an applicant before his desk. The failure was not of honesty in the narrow sense — it was a failure of conflict-of- interest disclosure, the most under-discussed and most consequential form of integrity breakdown in modern public administration.

This unit examines, through five archetypal cases, the anatomy of conflicts of interest — actual, potential, perceived — and the method of navigating them: Disclose → Recuse → Document.

Why this matters for UPSC

GS-IV Section B case studies on conflict of interest have appeared in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022, often disguised as questions about "divided loyalty," "favouritism," or "family pressure." The 2nd ARC Vol-IV (Chapter 4) treats it as a major ethics theme. The PCA 2018 amendment criminalised undisclosed private interest. Interview boards probe it through "your spouse runs a business — would you recuse?" questions.