Author: Bhupinder Sharma
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: October 16, 2012
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/nation/101923-whistleblowers-hounded-a-stalked-in-haryana.html

Whistleblowers in Haryana have faced the indifference of the Haryana Government, be it Sanjiv Chaturvedi, an IFS officer or Ashok Khemka, an IAS officer. Both had to pay the price for exposing wrongdoings in the Government.

 Chaturvedi came into limelight, when he exposed various scams in the Haryana Forest department between 2007 and 2012 following which he was transferred 12 times in five years. Later, he was suspended and chargesheeted. The Haryana Government had revoked the suspension order after the President’s intervention following his complaint.

 Similarly, 47-year-old IAS officer of 1991 batch Ashok Khemka, in his 21 years of service, has been transferred 43 times. His latest transfer order, he alleges, is influenced by vested interests because he exposed scams related to land deals in Gurgaon and Faridabad as director general, consolidation of holdings and land records, in his just two-month-long tenure.

 He even wrote a letter to chief secretary of Haryana PK Chaudhary and highlighted cases of fraudulent transfers involving “bigwigs”, whom he did not name.

 Chaturvedi challenged the might of Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and then Forest Minister of Haryana Kiran Chaudhary. He opposed the illegal construction of a canal through a wildlife sanctuary, misuse of public funds to import rare plants for a private herbal park, and embezzlement in the name of fake tree plantations.

 In just four years of service, Chaturvedi was transferred 11 times. After the Haryana Government wrongly suspended him, President Pratibha Patil had to intervene and revoke his mala fide suspension order. For his relentless use of the RTI to fight against a vindictive state that is out to crucify him, Chaturvedi has also won a certificate of appreciation from RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal besides an award from the Manjunath Trust, named after the Indian Oil whistleblower, who was killed by the petrol mafia in UP in 2005.

 It is the turn of Khemka to suffer now. In his letter to chief secretary, Khemka said that “during inspection of land records, it was discovered that thousands of acres of Panchayat land, after illegally being mutated in favour of owners, were subsequently partitioned into small parcels and sold.

 “I requested the chief secretary to see for himself the cases of villages Baad-Gujar, Rozka-Gujar and Shikhopur in Gurgaon; Kot, Chirsi and Ankhir in Faridabad; and Malikpur Bangar and Kalesar in Yamunanagar,”.

 Khemka further added that “there are fraudulent transactions where a party sells the same property more than once. There are benami transactions where black money is recycled to evade the law. Another modus operandi adopted is to transfer possessor rights of panchayat lands without authorisation of the panchayat,”.

 He said, “In some cases, the unauthorised occupants are industrial houses and senior officers. A particularly shocking case is of a senior IAS officer, retired in the rank of additional chief secretary and now re-employed as chairman of a regulatory body, who is reported to have constructed a building near Kalesar resthouse on panchayat land in the name of his nephew”.