The Lokpal At A Crossroads Between Statutory Promise And Institutional Reality
Ayush Agrawal, Rishabh Sisodiya & Sanya Daryani*
ABSTRACT
The Lokpal, India's apex anti-corruption ombudsman, was conceived as the institutional answer to a decades-old constitutional lacuna: the absence of an independent authority empowered to scrutinise the probity of the political executive and higher bureaucracy. Enacted in the wake of the 2011 civil- society mobilisation led by Anna Hazare, the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013 promised a hybrid ombudsman-cum-prosecutorial body capable of investigating and prosecuting corruption at the highest levels of government. Over a decade later, the institution remains encumbered by delayed operationalisation, jurisdictional ambiguity, and a widening gap between statutory promise and administrative practice. This paper undertakes a critical and comparative reappraisal of the Lokpal, situating the Indian experiment within the wider international lineage of ombudsman and anti- corruption institutions, and examines recent jurisprudential and administrative developments including the Supreme Court's 2025 intervention on the Lokpal's jurisdiction over judges and the 2026 Parliamentary Standing Committee findings on the institution's continuing inertia to test the hypothesis that the Lokpal's inherent structural design constrains its capacity to deliver good governance. The paper concludes with concrete suggestions for institutional reform.
Keywords: Lokpal; Anti-Corruption Law; Administrative Law; Institutional Independence; Public Accountability.
