Senior IAS officer chargesheeted

PATNA: The vigilance department filed a chargesheet in the court for vigilance cases here on Thursday against senior IAS officer Ashok Kumar Singh accusing him of collecting several lakhs of rupees as donations for two NGOs -- Green Earth India (GEI) and Samvedna -- from the entrepreneurs coming to the Bihar State Finance Corporation (BSFC) for loans during his tenure as its managing director.
Singh is at present posted at Ranchi as commissioner of the commercial taxes department of the Jharkhand government. While hearing a PIL, the Patna High Court had asked the vigilance department to investigate the case.
Vigilance officials, who checked the accounts of Samvedna and GEI in the Kankarbagh branches of the Allahabad Bank and UCO Bank respectively, claimed to have found the "illegally collected amounts" running into lakhs of rupees in the form of bonds as also in the accounts of both the favoured NGOs. They also claimed to have found that Singh collected "donations" from the entrepreneurs who were given financial assistance by the BSFC.
In all, 11 persons have been made accused in this case, including SSI Institute director Devendra Kumar Singh, Samvedna treasurer Namo Narayan Agrawal, GEI joint secretary Achal Kumar Rana, Patna University teacher Ranvijay Kumar, Kalika Singh (at present a senior manager of the Tele-Communicator Consultant (India) Ltd, Jodhpur, GEI treasurer Markandey Singh, Sravan Kumar, Baijnath Prasad and Arvind Kumar Singh.