13 Govt Engineers Out Of 30 Officers Arrested In Odisha For Corruption In Last One Year

The Odisha Vigilance has arrested as many as 30 government officials since March 2021, for amassing illegal wealth and surprisingly 13 of them are engineers employed in various State government departments.

As per the data released by the vigilance department, the 13 engineers arrested in the last financial year include one Superintendent Engineer, five Assistant Engineers, three Assistant Executive Engineers and one Junior Engineer.

As far as departments are concerned, engineers of Irrigation, Works and Energy Departments have earned the infamy of witnessing most corruption cases.

Even if the government employees take oath of honesty every year, their involvement in corruption surprises many.

A retired engineer, Lalit Mohan Patnaik says, “A racket seems to be working behind this corruption. There is a chain of command stretching right to the departmental minister. The buck stops with the politicians. If they want, corruption will vanish within no time.”

Odisha Vigilance on Friday arrested Kartikeswar Roul, Assistant Engineer, Bhanjanagar, Ganjam on charges of amassing assets to the tune of about 741 percent of his known sources of income.

The vigilance sleuths had seized around Rs 2 crore from the house of Roul and his second wife Kalpana Pradhan from a flat at Tata Ariana housing project in Bhubaneswar.

The raid was a continuation of Wednesday when properties amounting to Rs 2.76 crore were unearthed, which included two apartment flats, seven plots, a duplex at Jagamara in Bhubaneswar, bank deposits of Rs 37.27 lakh and Rs 2.5 lakh belonging to the engineer.