When a career bureaucrat with a corruption charge pending against him was chosen to be the chief vigilance commissioner, the Supreme Court nullified the appointment to protect the "institutional integrity" of the CVC.
This raises an obvious question: how can integrity be institutionalized in India where corruption in public life is pervasive, deep-rooted and ubiquitous?
The answer is to design a national integrity system with a set of mutually reinforcing anti-corruption measures — supporting each other when they are performing their function and checking when they do not. The primary function of an integrity system is to promote a positive value (integrity — the use of entrusted power for publicly justified purposes) rather than merely preventing its opposite (corruption — the abuse of entrusted power for private gain).