SUMAN K SHRIVASTAVA
Ranchi, April 21: Jharkhand IAS officer and ex-deputy commissioner of Ranchi Chhavi Ranjan today failed to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) which had earlier rejected his plea to grant him two weeks’ time.
The ED, instead, had directed him to appear at 4 pm on Friday. Ranjan, however, failed to follow this deadline too.
The ED is yet to fix a new date for interrogating Ranjan.
According to sources, the IAS officer has sought time on the ground he had already received ‘paternity leave’ from the government from April 17 to May 1. The ED issued him summons on April 17. He, sources said, has claimed that the government had sanctioned him leave on April 3 itself!
Notably, the ED had issued summons to Ranjan, a 2011 batch IAS officer, on April 17 to appear on April 21 and reply to the questions related to the illegal transfer of 4.55 acres of Indian Army on the basis of fake papers and fake owner to Jagat Bandhu Tea estate. He was also supposed to be grilled on how businessman Vishnu Agrawal was able to buy one acre of land near Cheshire home adopting the same modus operandi.
The role of Ranjan in transferring several pieces of prime lands had already been questioned several times by the then Divisional Commissioner N M Kulkarni in his report sent to the state government. The revenue department is said to have had turned a blind eye to all these reports.
Ranjan was Ranchi DC from July 15, 2020 to July 11, 2022. He is the second IAS officer of the Jharkhand cadre against whom the federal agency has conducted raids in the past one year.
Ranjan’s lawyer Abhishek Gupta today informed the ED that Ranjan was out of station and will reach here by evening tomorrow.
The agency had also issued summons on April 17 to Tridip Mishra, Additional Registrar of Assurance in the Kolkata registry office to appear on May 2 since all these land documents were forged in Kolkata.
Incidentally, Chhavi Ranjan stands chargesheeted in a case for cutting trees in the official campus of the Koderma DC, when he was posted there.
The ED had already arrested seven persons, including a circle inspector and land brokers and is interrogating them in the land scam in Ranchi. Apparently, the agency wants to confront Ranjan with the revelations made by these seven persons during interrogations.
The arrested persons included businessman Pradeep Bagchi, Bargain Circle Inspector Bhanu Pratap Prasad, Afsar Ali, Imtiaz Khan, Talha Khan, Fayaz Khan and Mohammad Saddam.
Notably, the Enforcement Directorate had conducted raids on April 13 on 21 locations linked to Chhavi Ranjan and spread across three states of Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal. It had unearthed a huge land scam by a gang of scamsters having expertise in manufacturing face documents, falsifying and forging original documents in Ranchi.
BJP legislature party leader Babulal Marandi has alleged that the land scam is worth Rs 10,000 crore and Chhavi Ranjan is the main character of this land fraud.
