Early Times Report
Jammu, June 11: A curious case has surfaced in Noida where an engineer had named a pair of two boys and a girl from two wives with same names to avoid coming under the radar of income tax authorities.
However, the Income Tax department, finally, learned about the massive corruption of the croreparti engineer. On Friday last, the IT sleuths raided his house in the Noida Authority and exposed the assistant project engineer (APE) Chaudhary Brijpal Singh, 59, and laid bare his illegal property ownership.
The point to be noted here is that in Jammu and Kashmir, the second most corrupt state of the country, these cases are a daily occurrences and most of the accused Brijpals get scot-free as hardly any investigation is carried against them.
A cursory look at posh areas of Hyderpora, Rajbagh, Jawahar Nagar in Srinagar and Gandhinagar, Sidhra, Bhagwati Nagar in Jammu will reveal how government officials have amassed huge wealth while most of the population of the state is going through a terrible economic recession. A house of a serving or retired government official in these posh colonies costs, on an average, Rs 2-3 crore, according to the real estate managers.
Children of dozens of government officials are currently studying, or have studied, in top colleges and universities in the US, Europe and Australia. Just a handful of corrupt officials have been caught in the Vigilance Organisation's net in the last three-four decades, only to come out with a clean-chit, hence making mockery of the so-called investigations.
In the curious case of Brijpal Singh, it was found that Singh owns 25 properties registered in the names of his family members. He was shocked when an IT department found out about his two wives and children. He kept the same names for his children from both wives to make the property buying and selling procedure suspicion free.
Such cases are abundantly available in J&K and one only needs to scratch the surface and then see what lies beneath the surface.
The need of the hour is that an independent and impartial inquiry should be initiated against those officials who loot the state resources through fraudulent means at the expense of common man's misery.
As Brijpal Singh's properties are going to be seized once the investigation is over, same should be done with tainted officials of J&K. |
