Sanitary inspector, junior engineer caught red-handed in separate cases of bribery
Two public servants were arrested by the state and central agencies for accepting bribes in the city on Thursday.
In the first case, the state Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) arrested a sanitary inspector with the H/East Ward of the BMC after he was allegedly caught red-handed taking a bribe of Rs 2 lakh. The accused, identified as Sarabjit Bajwa, along with another BMC official from the H/East Ward, had sought a bribe of Rs 3 lakh, as per the complainant.
An ACB official said the complainant has a consultancy firm where he arranged for licenses, permits and other permissions needed by businessmen from various government departments. In this case, a restaurant owner had approached him to get a health license for his establishment.
The complainant then went to the H/East Ward to get the necessary process started. As per the complainant, there he met the sanitary inspector Sarabjit Singh Bajwa who asked him to pay a bribe of Rs 2 lakh and upload some documents online. Accordingly, the complainant said he paid Rs 2 lakh and completed the process following which the license was issued. The complainant added that some time later, another BMC employee, Pramod Patil, came to the establishment and said the license that had been obtained was incorrect. As per the complaint, Patil then asked him to come to the ward office, the ACB said.
The complainant added that when he visited the H/East ward office, he met Patil and Bajwa. Patil allegedly told him that he would have to pay a bribe of Rs 5 lakh. 'The duo said that since he had already paid Rs 2 lakh, he would have to pay another Rs lakh,' an official said.
The complainant, who did not want to make any further payments, then approached the ACB on May 14 and gave a complaint. Based on the ACB probe, it was established that the accused Bajwa had demanded Rs 3 lakh bribe and had agreed to accept Rs 2.5 lakh.
Accordingly, the ACB team asked the complainant to meet Bajwa with the money on Thursday and as he was accepting Rs 2 lakh, the ACB officials nabbed him red-handed and placed him under arrest. An official said they will be interrogating him to find out the role of the other public servants allegedly involved in asking for bribes.
In the second case, the CBI on Thursday arrested Dinesh Chandra Pandey, a junior engineer with Naval Officers Family Residential Area (NOFRA) in Navy Nagar, Mumbai, for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs 4.5 lakh. The accused asked the complainant who had secured the contract of special repair work at a building in Navy Nagar to pay the bribe if he wanted his bills of Rs 40 lakh to be cleared.
The accused was caught red-handed while accepting the bribe and was taken into custody by the CBI.
Special public prosecutor Sandeep Singh said the accused was produced before the court and remanded to CBI custody till June 9.
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