Better
India: National: Sunday, October 28, 2018.
Whistleblowers
in the government suffer for doing their job with honesty and integrity. This
the cold reality of India. For a country supposedly tired of corruption in
government, we do very little to hold elected representatives with vested
interests, accountable.
Instead,
whistleblowers suffer constant harassment, loss of professional perks and even
death on numerous occasions for speaking the truth.
This
is true for the whistleblower from Haryana who has received death threats for
exposing illegal sand mining along the banks of Yamuna and Anand Rai, the
government doctor who exposed the massive Vyapam scam in 2013, but is now
enduring what is commonly known in bureaucratic circles as ‘punishment
postings’ and receiving the usual litany of death threats.
Despite
the existence of this dynamic in our country ever since Independence, many
conscientious government servants and citizens have bravely come out to present
the truth.
One
such man was Satyendra Dubey, an Indian Engineering Service officer working with
the National Highways Authority of India, who was murdered for seemingly
exposing serious corruption in the Centre’s Golden Quadrilateral Highway
construction project.
Despite
understanding the fate of whistleblowers in India, Dubey fearlessly took his
exposition of the truth to the highest office of the land. Sadly, he was
seemingly murdered for trying to expose the truth. He had faith in the system,
but it failed him.
This
is his story.
Born
into a family of small farmers (his mother also held a clerical job at a sugar
mill) in the Sahpur village of the Siwan district, Bihar, Dubey was a
high-performing student in school, topping the state in both Class X and Class
XII board exams. Soon, he would clear the famous JEE examination and obtain
admission into IIT-Kanpur in the civil engineering department.
After
his bachelors, he would go onto earn a MTech in civil engineering from the then
Institute of Technology, Benares Hindu University (IIT-BHU) in 1996. Following
a master’s degree, Dubey joined the Indian Engineering Service and was deputed
to the NHAI in July 2002.
He
was appointed as a Project Director in the Koderma city in Jharkhand, where he
was to oversee work on the 60 km-long Aurangabad-Barachatti segment of National
Highway-2 (Grand Trunk Road). This segment, and the larger highway, were part
of the Central government’s Golden Quadrilateral Corridor Project, which sought
to link India’s major cities with four and six-lane express highways, and was
constructed at an approximate cost of Rs 600 billion. Launched in 2001, this
project was reportedly completed in 2012.
Discovering
serious financial and procedural irregularities in the construction of this
section of the Golden Quadrilateral, Dubey initially ordered the contractor on
this project to suspend three of his engineers. He even directed the contractor
to rebuild six kilometres of poor-quality road a slap across the face for the
road contract mafia characterised by a nexus of corrupt politicians, government
officials, business enterprises and criminal elements.
Despite
referring the matter to his superiors in the NHAI, he was soon shunted out of
Koderma and transferred to Gaya in Bihar. Dubey opposed this decision, feeling
that he was more useful in Koderma than Gaya. However, his crusade against
corruption didn’t stop there.
Even
in Gaya, he exposed serious financial irregularities in the process of
sub-contracting and the construction of poor-quality roads. Troubled by what he
saw, Dubey wrote a long letter to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
exposing systematic corruption in the NHAI.
“A
dream project of unparalleled importance to the nation, but in reality, a great
loot of public money because of very poor implementation at every state,” wrote
Dubey.
Through
his letter, Dubey sought to expose a conspiracy between the contractors
building the roads and the officials appointed to oversee them. He ended his
letter by saying, “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.”
Besides
detailing the misdeeds of contractors, NHAI officials and even global
infrastructure companies, he made a point of requesting the PMO to keep his
name secret and sent the letter unsigned, although he attached his bio-data.
Instead
of abiding by his wishes, the PMO forwarded the letter along with his bio-data
to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, where it sat on file for
months.
“Dubey’s
letter is riddled with signatures and scribbles of officials indicating it was
a classic case of a file going into babudom’s endless orbit,” says this Indian
Express report. His name was leaked everywhere and by some accounts the road
contract mafia got their hand on a copy of the letter.
Dubey
even sent a copy of this letter to the then NHAI chairman. He received a
response reprimanding him of disrespecting the chain of command by directly
writing to the Prime Minister.
On
November 27, 2003, Dubey was murdered while returning home from a wedding in
Varanasi. While the Central Bureau of Investigation concluded their
investigation into his murder as a case of robbery, the death and disappearance
of several key witnesses and stunning escape of the prime accused from police
custody, raised serious suspicion of bigger and more sinister forces at play.
In
2010, a fast track court in Patna convicted three petty thieves of murder, a
decision contested by Dubey’s brother Dhananjay, who believed the three were
“innocent.”
“The
real culprits are still on the loose. It’s simply a cover-up by the CBI. Its
statement is totally false,” said Dhananjay to the Times of India.
Despite
the eternal tragedy of Dubey’s passing, what it did was really trigger protests
in India with the media going to town against the government for failing to
protect him and properly investigate his allegations. Besides inspiring others
to show the same degree of courage, it even strengthened the call for greater
probity in public life with the enactment of the Right to Information Act in
2005, and Whistleblowers Protection Act in May 2014.
Nonetheless,
the road to greater probity in public life is constant struggle. Despite the
enactment of such laws, what the government has done is introduce amendments
that will further discourage whistleblowers from coming forward. In 2015, the
Centre introduced an amendment to the bill, which among other things got rid of
certain safeguards like protecting whistleblowers from prosecution under the
draconian Official Secrets Act.
Besides
the obvious persecution they endure, whistleblowers are now susceptible to
prosecution as well. “Moreover, the amendment forbids disclosure of many
categories of information in a whistle-blower complaint, such as information
related to the integrity, security, strategic, scientific or economic interests
of the state or information that relates to commercial confidence unless that
information has been obtained under the RTI,” reports Business Standard.
Citizens
must remain vigilant, and the sacrifice of people like Satyendra Dubey must not
go in vain.
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