VIJAY DEO JHA
Ranchi, Feb. 10: BJP MP Nishikant Dubey has accused Energy Secretary Avinash Kumar of arm twisting the Enforcement Directorate (ED) of disconnecting the power supply to the office of the agency in Ranchi since it was investigating senior IAS officer Pooja Singhal.
Amid the investigation of the alleged MNREGA scam in Khunti and Chatra districts and the mining scam in Palamu in Jharkhand by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), Dubey got an opportunity to hit the Hemant Soren government.
In a tweet posted on February 10, Dubey said that since the ED sought information about IAS Pooja Singhal in some of the alleged corruption cases, the energy secretary of Jharkhand Avinash Kumar ordered the disconnection of the power supply to the ED.
“A few months back the ED was arm-twisted this way. The power supply was disconnected on the ground of the pending bill. Some people in the state bureaucracy are unhappy after the ED called the Deputy Commissioner of a district to provide documents of related cases pertaining to the tenure of Pooja Singhal. After the ED sought papers, Avinash Kumar ordered this and he told the reasons to the ED also,” Dubey said.
Dubey further claimed that the action of the energy department was ill-motivated since it neither generated any bill nor informed the ED in advance.
Well-placed sources in the government confirmed that the power supply of the ED office was in fact disconnected due to nonpayment of bills. A few months back the ED shifted its office from Pee Pee Compound to Airport Road. It shifted its office to a building confiscated from former minister Enos Ekka.
The incident had taken place in September-October last year when the ED officials and employees had organized a programme on the concluding day of the fortnight-long Hindi Diwas. The power remained disconnected throughout the day. The ED raised an objection and said that the department should first provide the bill. The ED is learnt to have brought the matter to the notice of Chief Secretary of Jharkhand Sukhdev Singh also. The ED communicated to the concerned authority that never happened when the power supply of a central agency and undertaking was disrupted on such a minor ground.
After much hassles, the ED could get the power supply restored, and about a fortnight back the ED paid the bill worth Rs 50,000 against power consumption after the bill was provided.
On being contacted, Avinash Kumar said that he was not aware of any such thing. “Why should I give directions to disconnect the power supply of a government office? The power supply of the government offices is not disconnected,” he said.
Notably, the ED is investigating the alleged scam in the MNREGA scheme in Khunti and Chatra besides the transfer of the forest land to a private company for mining in Palamu when she was Deputy Commissioner of these districts.
