IAS Neeraj arrested in NRHM scam

Jaipur: IAS officer Neeraj K Pawan was arrested on Monday along with Rajasthan Administrative Service officer Anil Agarwal for allegedly manipulating National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) tenders for personal gains.
The arrests come almost a fortnight after the Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) registered a case under Prevention of Corruption Act and Indian Penal Code against Pawan, director of NRHM-IEC at the time the tenders were allegedly manipulated, additional director Agarwal, chief accounts officer Deepa Gupta, store keeper Joji Varghese and private person Ajit Soni.
Pawan, who is a 2003 batch IAS officer, is the fourth IAS officer whom the ACB has arrested in the state. Earlier, Ashok Singhvi, G S Sandhu and Lalchand Aswal were arrested.
At the time the ACB busted the NRHM bribery racket, Pawan was posted as commissioner in the agriculture department.
He and Agarwal were under 'awaiting posting order' (APO) since May 19 following an FIR on May 17 against the five persons for allegedly manipulating tenders. The complainant had alleged that he paid a bribe of Rs 1.5 crore to get a work order of nearly Rs five crore from NRHM-IEC.
"In a corruption case you always have strong reasons to arrest an accused even on the day when the FIR is lodged, as we lodge FIR only after a primary enquiry and verification of facts,'' said ACB inspector general Dinesh M N.
"During the questioning of the IAS officer we corroborated various evidences. Our job was to find out if Pawan had cleared bills after getting directions from Ajit Soni, the middleman. There were several questions to which Pawan had no answers,'' Dinesh said.
An officer told TOI that such was the nexus that Ajit Soni, the middleman, was directing the IAS officer to frame policies to benefit the firm responsible for running Aarogya Rath, a Rs 5 crore project.
ACB went through nearly 8,000 pages and 150 files of the NRHM-IEC to establish the nexus of corruption. "We had examined large number of witnesses including the contractors and vendors working with NRHM to find out if Soni played the role of catalyst in fixing up the bribe money to award tender in favour of a particular firm," the officer said.
It was on May 17 that ACB registered an FIR against Pawan and the four others after raiding 18 places, including houses and offices of these officials.
Three of them - Deepa Gupta, Joji Varghese and Ajit Kumar Soni - were arrested the same day.