New Delhi, May 17: A Supreme Court bench today declined to entertain a plea that a group of ministers reviewing the CBI’s functioning should consider parliamentary committees’ reports on the agency’s autonomy, saying another panel of judges was hearing a related matter.

The plea for such a directive was filed by a CBI officer who cited the coal block allocation probe whose reports the Centre allegedly changed, prompting the court to dub the agency a “caged parrot”.

The officer claimed that the group of ministers (GoM), headed by finance minister P. Chidambaram, was going ahead with its job ignoring the House committees’ proposals to insulate the CBI from extraneous influences.

“We can’t issue a mandamus (a directive issued to a lower authority) to the government to place it (House panel reports) before the group of ministers. Anyway, another bench is hearing the matter. You can take up the issue with that concerned bench,” Justices B.S. Chauhan and Dipak Misra told the lawyer for Tanmay Behera, a superintendent in the CBI’s Delhi unit.

The other bench is hearing another plea, also filed by CBI officers, for direct recruitment. Behera alleged the Centre planned to do away with the 50 per cent direct recruitment to the CBI — the rest are taken from states and other agencies — and induct all officers through deputation.

Behera sought the directive on the House panel reports — he said 12 such dossiers had been filed — claiming the Centre was planning an ordinance to meet a court-set deadline for steps to free the CBI after being rapped over the coal probe.

The Centre has been asked to explain by July 10 whether it will bring a new law or ordinance to make the CBI autonomous, failing which the court warned it would be forced to frame new guidelines.

“This group of ministers is to submit their report within three weeks, even though 12 reports have been submitted by the department-related standing committees on the working of the CBI,” Behera’s plea said, referring to the House panels attached to the department of personnel.

The “most important” of the House reports was one submitted to the Rajya Sabha in March 2008, Behera’s plea said, adding it is “very comprehensive” and “exclusively dedicated to the functioning of CBI over the last six decades”.

“The government has deliberately disregarded, overlooked and failed to take into consideration successive reports of the standing committee on the working of the CBI.”

The Centre has “arbitrarily” set up the GoM to study the functioning of the CBI and recommend measures, and plans an ordinance or a law on the agency before the July 10 hearing, Behera said.

He alleged the Centre had decided to stop all direct recruitment of officers with the sole intention of preventing the creation of a dedicated CBI cadre, and that the new rules would be notified soon.