Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Another big black sheep, who is in Indian Administrative Service (IAS) by promotion, stands symbolic of how Chief Minister Navin Patnaik has promoted mafia in state administration.
He is Himansu Sekhar Samantray, incumbent Managing Director of Orissa Lift Irrigation Corporation that is being steered by Sri Patnaik himself as the concerned minister.
A vigilance raid propelled by bold informers has unearthed accumulation of more than Rs.10 crores worth wealth by Samantray beyond his known source of income.
This case is just another case.
Intermittently Orissa Vigilance conducts some such raids and warms up media headlines and then takes a sound sleep until some other insistent informer rouses it up to a new raid.
It has never informed the people of what punishment is meted out to officers, who were caught with corrupt wealth in raids it conducted, at least never in the Navin regime.
Even the vigilance directorate never responds to journalistic queries as to how much such corrupt wealth has ever been confiscated offenderwise.
What happens to the piles unmasked as castles of illegal income during quantity surveying by the vigilance organization? Peoples are kept in dark. And, deliberately.
So the farce of vigilance prosecution will go on in matter of Samantray as it goes in matters of others without any benefit to the tax-payers whose money fellows like him swindle.
To go beyond this farce, we stress on action against the person or persons whose patronization has helped Samantray bag promotion after promotion to rise from Orissa Administrative Service (OAS) to IAS that he has used as his way to acquire such massive illicit wealth.
Chief Minister Navin Patnaik must place details of his patrons before the public and also reveal the details of his reporting officers who in his confidential character rolls had given this corrupt officer “outstanding” remarks to help him supersede other OAS officers in promotion to IAS.
He also should reveal as to how the Comptroller and Auditor General had viewed the fund management angles while auditing accounts of offices under his control periodwise and the details of internal audits relevant to him.
It is a shame that the Chief Minister is trying to use vigilance raids to his political advantage. Instead of playing this nefarious game, he should make no delay in letting people know the functionaries on whose help this big black sheep has climbed the ladder of departmental promotions so far so unhindered.
It is also better for vigilance to stop parading such fuzzy pictures of rash raids and to bring out to public gaze the behind-the-screen godfathers of Samantray and his likes so that people at least can know how Navin regime has helped Mafia to grow in administration.
If Navin Patnaik has not helped mafia to grow, he should use his constitutional prerogatives to demote Samantary and compel the executive functionaries to detect his godfathers so that they can at least be damned.
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