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Satyendra Kumar Dubey (1973–2003) was project director at the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). He was assassinated in Gaya, Bihar for fighting corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral highway construction project.
Early life
Satyendra K. Dubey, the son of Bageshwari Dubey and Phulamati Devi, was born at the village of Shahpur in the Sewan district of Bihar, India. The family of five girls and two boys subsisted on a small piece of land, and Bageshwari also held a low-paying clerical position in a nearby sugar mill.
Until the age of 15 he studied at the Gang Baksh Kannaudi High School and joined junior college at Allahabad, about three hundred kilometers away. Living away from home was a considerable drain on the meager resources of his family. However, he pursued his dream of becoming an engineer, and was admitted to the Civil Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur in 1990, the first person from his village to .
He graduated with an excellent academic record in 1994. Subsequently, he joined the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University for an M.Tech. in Civil Engineering and to prepare for the Indian Engineering Service.
Professional Life
For some time, Dubey worked at the Ministry of Surface Transport in Delhi, before he was selected for the Indian Engineering Service (IES), India's top engineering bureaucracy. While at the ministry, he once called the police when offerered a bribe 1.
In July 2002 he was employed by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI).
Dubey became the Assistant Project Manager at Koderma, Jharkhand, responsible for managing a part of the Aurangabad-Barachatti section of National Highway 1 (The Grand Trunk Road). During this period, he got the contractor of the project to suspend three of his engineers after exposing serious financial irregularities. At one point, he had the contractor rebuild six kilometers of under-quality road, a huge loss for the road contract mafia.
This highway was part of the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) Corridor Project, the Prime Minister's baby, which aimed to connect the metros of the country by four-lane limited-access highways totalling 14,000 km, at an overall cost more than USD 10 billion.
Exposing Corruption
The GQ project had strict controls to ensure that the construction work would be carried on by experienced firms with proper systems. A second independent contract was given for supervision of the project. However, Dubey discovered that the contracted firm, Larsen and Toubro, had been quietly subcontracting the actual work to smaller low-technology groups, controlled by the local mafia. When he wrote to his boss, NHAI Project Director SK Soni, and to Brig Satish Kapoor, engineer overlooking the supervision, there was no action.According to the case file after his murder (FIR), Dubey had been facing several threats following his action against corruption at Koderma. A subsequent FIR filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) named both Soni and Kapoor.
In August 2003 when he was transferred to Gaya, a transfer which he opposed since he felt that it not serve the interests of NHAI.
At Gaya, he exposed large-scale flouting of NHAI rules regarding sub-contracting and quality control. At this time he took a departmental test and was promoted as deputy general manager, which made him eligible to take charge as project director. Since there was no project director's post in Gaya, he was likely to be posted to Koderma soon.
There was widespread sentiment (based on their pattern of operation), that the criminal nexus, opposed to having him as director, may have been behind his murder.
Letter to the Prime Minister
Meanwhile, faced with the possibility of high-level corruption within the NHAI, Dubey wrote directly to the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, detailing the financial and contractual irregularities in the project. While the letter was not signed, he attached a separate bio-data so that the matter would be taken more seriously. Despite a direct request that his identity be kept secret and its sensitive content that pointed fingers at some of his superiors, the letter along with bio-data was forwarded immediately to the Ministry for Road Transport. Dubey also sent the same letter to the Chairman, NHAI.
Soon Dubey received a reprimand: the vigilance office of NHAI officially "cautioned" Dubey for the impropriety of writing a letter directly to the Prime minister. In the process, through connections in the NHAI and the Ministry, it is likely that the letter may have reached the criminal nexus running the highway construction projects in Bihar.
Following the event, pressure is mounting in India to incorporate a Whistleblower Law.
Contents of the Letter
The letter said the NHAI officials showed great hurry in giving mobilisation advance to selected contractors for financial consideration. "In some cases the contractors have been given mobilisation advance just a day after signing the contract agreement.""The entire mobilisation advance of 10 per cent of contract value, which goes up to Rs 40 crore (USD 10 million) in certain cases, are paid to contractors within a few weeks of award of work but there is little follow up to ensure that they are actually mobilised at the site with the same pace, and the result is that the advance remains lying with contractors or gets diverted to their other activities," it said.
Dubey also highlighted the problems of sub-contracting by the primary contractors.
"Though the NHAI is going for international competitive bidding to procure the most competent civil contractors for execution of its projects, when it comes to actual execution, it is found that most of the works, sometimes even up to 100 per cent are subcontracted to petty contractors in capable of executing such big projects," he said. Everyone in the NHAI is aware of the phenomenon of subcontracting but turned the other way.
"I have written all these in my individual capacity. However, I will keep on addressing these issues in my official capacity in the limited domain within the powers delegated to me," the letter said.
Assassination
On November 27, 2003, Dubey was returning from a wedding in Varanasi, and called his driver to meet him at the station. He reached Gaya railway station at three in the morning, and found that the his car was not able to come because of a battery malfunction.
It appears that at this point Dubey decided to take a rickshaw home. When he didn’t reach home, his driver went to look for him and found him dead by the side of the road in the suburb of A.P. Colony. He had been shot.
The news ignited tremendous public hue and cry. The matter was raised in Parliament, and the Prime Minister shifted the onus of investigation from the Bihar Police (who might themselves be implicated), to the CBI.
A foundation, SK Dubey foundation, was set up to fight corruption in India.
The CBI registered a case against unknown persons under 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and 302 (murder) of Indian Penal Code and various provision under Arms Act on December 14 2003.
The Investigation
In early investigations, the CBI interrogated the rickshaw puller Pradeep Kumar who was caught using Dubey's stolen cell phone. The mobile phone was switched off for about a fortnight after the murder, but then Kumar called his 'second wife' in Kolkata, following which the CBI traced the rickshaw puller to his slum in Gaya. Although Kumar had a criminal history in similar cases of robbery, it appears he was released after interrogation, and could not be traced a month later.Two other suspects, Sheonath Sah and Mukendra Paswan, were questioned by the CBI. They were found dead from poisoning on February 1, 2004, within 25 hours of the CBI questioning. Sah's father lodged an FIR against the CBI with the Bihar Police, but CBI Director Umashanker Mishra called their deaths a suicide in a press meeting a few days later.
The CBI concluded its investigations and four persons were charge-sheeted on September 3, 2004. Based on testimony by Pradeep Kumar, who was his rickshaw puller, the event was presented as an attempted robbery. Because Satyendra put up a fight about giving up his briefcase, he was shot.
The person accused of actually shooting Dubey with a country-made pistol was Mantu Kumar, son of Lachhu Singh, of Village Katari, Gaya district. Accomplices with him included Uday Kumar, Pinku Ravidas and Shravan Kumar.
Murderer Escapes
On September 19 2005, while the case was being heard in Patna, Bihar in the court of Addl. Session Judge, J M Sharma, Mantu Kumar escaped from the court premises, leading to widespread allegations of police complicity. While Mantu was being held at the high security Beur Jail, the invigilation can be lax during such court appearances, and it is a common tactic of the mafia to organize a few policemen to make it possible for the criminal to escape.It was felt that the escape was engineered by higher-ups who may have executed the murder through Mantu Kumar.
The CBI announced a cash reward of Rs. 1 Lakh for apprehending Mantu.
A month later, Mantu Kumar was arrested from near his home in Panchayatee Akhada in Gaya. He had apparently been living in Gaya town and working as a rickshaw puller.
Who ordered the murder
Now, it is quite possible that Dubey may have been the victim of a simple robbery during which Mantu Kumar shot him, as alleged in the case filed by CBI. However, given the death and disappearance of several witnesses and the startling escape of the prime accused, there is wide-spread speculation that vested interests may have engaged the criminals who actually pulled the trigger.As for the GQ project, the Supreme Court is currently overlooking investigations into the corruption charges initially raised by the Dubey letter. Several official have been indicted and a technical team is overseeing the actual construction.
Also, as of September 2005, news reports indicated that the law ministry was about to introduce legislation to protect whistleblowers.
Meanwhile, on February 10, 2006, a 600 meter stretch of the highway connecting Kolkata to Chennai subsided into the ground, opening up ten meter gorges near Bally, West Bengal 2. This stretch had been completed a year back by a multinational firm, selected after global tendering.
Fighting Corruption
It is a testimony to fickleness of public memory that there was little hue and cry about Mantu Kumar's escape. Fortunately he was re-arrested.However, even if it establishes these men as the actual perpetrators of the murder, the motives for the murder remain to be clarified...
However, the fight against corruption in India continues. Unfortunately it continues to claim lives.
A kindred spirit of Dubey, S. Manjunath, was a graduate of the prestigious IIM Lucknow, 2003 batch. Manju was working as a Sales Manager with Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL), and refused bribes and ignored threats in his drive to check rampant adulteration of petrol in the pumps owned by the erstwhile monopoly Indianoil. On November 19, 2005, he was shot dead in Lakhimpur Kheri, allegedly by a petrol pump owner and his gang.
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