When the State is busy celebrating the Vigilance Awareness Week and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is boasting of high conviction rate, Vigilance officials have failed to prove charges against an Assistant Engineer whom they had caught “red-handed” while taking bribe on May 5, 2010.
The Assistant Engineer Debasish Dixit works in the Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology (OUAT).There was an allegation that the Vigilance sleuths had caught the engineer while he was receiving bribe Rs10,000 from a contractor, Susant Sundaray, to pass his pending bills for payment.
The Vigilance department had started investigating the matter after registering a case against Dixit which later went to the Court of Special Judge Vigilance, Bhubaneswar.Dixit’s lawyers SS Rath and Rajashree Mohapatra said eleven witnesses including Vigilance officials and independent persons had deposed before the court. But during the cross-examinations by Dixit’s lawyer, it was found that the evidences contradicted with each other, as a result of which the court acquitted Dixit.
