New Delhi, India (CNN) -- India's beleaguered prime minister pledged to introduce a long-pending anti-graft legislation in parliament after a 72-year-old reformist indefinite hunger strike over corruption galvanized public support.
The citizen ombudsman bill will be re-drafted jointly by a group civil society activists and federal ministers, a government notification said Saturday as hunger-striker Anna Hazare ended his "fast-unto-death" after five days.
Authorities said the new bill aimed at creating citizen ombudsman with sweeping powers to tackle corruption will be introduced in the next session of parliament.
"The fact that civil society and (the) government have joined hands to evolve a consensus to move this historic legislation augurs well for our democracy," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Hazare shot off a stiff letter to Singh, after his office insisted that talks had earlier failed because activists demanded their version of a citizen ombudsman bill be accepted in totality.
"It is being said that the government wants to talk to us and we are not talking to them. This is utterly false. Tell me a single meeting when you called us and we did not come. We strongly believe in dialogue and engagement. Kindly do not mislead the country by saying that we are shunning dialogue," Hazare wrote.
Demonstrators showed their support for Hazare in the streets of New Delhi and several other cities. Protesters carried flags, candles and banners condemning corruption during his hunger strike that began on Tuesday at the Indian capital's Jantar Mantar observatory.
Hazare's campaign comes in the wake of a series of high-profile alleged scandals that have rocked Singh's administration and investor confidence in Asia's third largest economy.
The activist demanded that the proposed citizen ombudsman legislation, called the Lokpal bill, be widened in its scope.
Hazare and his supporters rejected the previous government's draft of the law because it did not empower bodies to prosecute corruption suspects.
Last weekend, a former government minister in India was among a dozen defendants charged in a multi-billion-dollar telecom scandal.
Andimuthu Raja, a former telecommunication minister, is accused of being involved in a scheme involving the underselling of cell phone licenses at the height of India's lucrative telecom boom.
Police have questioned several high-profile executives in connection with the suspected below-price sale of radiowaves in 2008.
Politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate officials linked to the probe have denied any wrongdoing.
According to a government audit, the treasury lost as much as $31 billion from the 2008 sale of the second-generation wireless spectrum.
The damning audit report came on the heels of allegations of massive fraud in sports and real estate.
Two parliamentary committees are conducting separate inquiries into the case.
Investigators are already probing complaints of financial malfeasance in the Commonwealth Games that India hosted in October last year.
Several politicians, military officials, and bureaucrats have also been the subjects of a separate inquiry for allegedly taking apartments meant for war widows.
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