Bhubaneswar: In 2007, newspaper headlines screamed that a nexus existed between a section of the Odisha Police cops and some anti-social elements from Bihar. Subsequently, the Lokpal probed into the allegations and submitted a report to the Governor’s secretariat. So far so good. Surprisingly, now the state government claims that the report is ‘missing’.
While mystery over the ‘missing’ report has been deepening, the Opposition in the state does not seem to be in a mood to let the government go scot free with the ‘lackadaisical’ attitude of the state government.
For the uninitiated, a former Director General of Odisha Police, Sanjiv Marik, who was an IG then, faced an enquiry after reports regarding his alleged alliance with some bank robbers from Bihar, who were involved in several cases of robbery in the state in 2007, came to the fore. Later, the state government also suspended him.
Since then, various RTI applications seeking the Lokpal panel’s probe report has been passing from one table to another under various departments of the state government, but none has received a satisfactory response. After sitting on the applications for long, the Public Information Officer (PIO) recently informed this reporter that the report was never sent to them. In June this year, this reporter had filed an RTI application seeking a copy of the Lokpal probe report along with incident- and year-wise details regarding various probes initiated by the Lokapal Commission from the Governor’s secretariat.
In response, the Governor’s secrtariat forwarded the applications to the GA&PG department stating that the said report was not in their possession.
Meanwhile, the PIO-cum-Under Secretary to GA&PG department sent a letter (1924/GA&PG, PG (IM)-26/2019) seeking further clarifications despite the fact that all queries had been mentioned precisely in the RTI application.
However, this reporter obliged the department by submitting the queries once again.
In response, the department mentioned that the erstwhile Public Grievances & Pension Administration department had never received the said report (403(R) of 2007). Another RTI query also received a similar response. As a result, it has only helped to deepen the mystery over the ‘missing’ report. Today, no one knows where the the findings of the Lokpal Commission have ‘disappeared’.