Six times Indian whistleblowers uncovered scams and made headlines

According to data by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, from 2005 to 2018, there have been 315 attacks on Indian whistle-blowers who have exercised the RTI Act to expose scams and corruption. Photo: iStock

On October 1, the Wall Street Journal released the Facebook files based on a series of internal documents provided by 37-year-old Frances Haugen, a data scientist and former Facebook employee. The whistleblower, who had left Facebook in May, testified before the US Congress on October 5 that the tech giant's products cause harm to children and weaken democracy. Haugen's revelations once again brought Facebook's policies under scrutiny and reignited the debate concerning hate speech, misinformation, and the privacy and security of the platform's users.

From Edward Snowden and Julian Assange to Frances Haugen, a number of international whistleblowers have made headlines in India in the last decade. However, India has its own list of whistleblowers who have been instrumental in exposing high-profile national scams and major cases of corruption in the recent past, often at the cost of their lives.

Here's a list of six Indian citizens who set the stage for whistleblowing in the country and inspired many to expose illegitimate activities across sectors:

1. Satyendra Dubey:

Satyendra Dubey, one of the earliest Indian whistleblowers, was an Indian Engineering Services (IES) officer who was appointed as a project director under the National Highway Authority of India. He was handling the construction of a part of the Aurangabad-Barachatti section of the NH 2 (The Grand Trunk Road), a highway which was a part of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's major infrastructure project, the ‘Golden Quadrilateral Project', at Koderma district of Jharkhand. Dubey brought to light the financial irregularities in the project operations and caused the suspension of three engineers by the contractor. On November 27, 2003, when Dubey was returning from a wedding in Varanasi, he was shot dead after he reached Gaya. Dubey's driver found his body lying by the road side at A.P colony. Dubey was posthumously awarded the ‘Whistleblower of the Year' award by the London-based group organisation Index on Censorship.

2. Shanmugam Manjunath

A computer science engineer and a grade ‘A' government officer at the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Shanmugam Manjunath exposed the corruption at two petrol pumps in Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh. Under his authority, he sealed the two petrol pumps, which were selling adulterated fuel and conducted surprise raids when they started operating again after a month. On November 19, 2005, Manjunath was shot dead with six bullets in the town of Gola Gokarannath in Lakhimpur Kheri and his body was found in the backseat of his own car, driven by two employees of the petrol pump.

3. Lalit Mehta

Lalit Mehta, an engineer by profession, was actively involved in the activities of the ‘The Right to Food' campaign in Palamu district of Jharkhand. Mehta exposed corruption in the operations of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. He undertook a social audit of the scheme with the help of economists and was murdered before he could unearth the whole scam. On May 15, 2008, Mehta was attacked while he was traveling on his bike in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh.

4. IPS Narendra Kumar Singh

In 2012, Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Narendra Kumar Singh uncovered a mining scam in Morena district of Madhya Pradesh, which is known for its fine quality of sand for construction. He was posted in Morena in 2009 and despite multiple threats Singh was actively involved in tracking the activities of the sand mafia, who were mining sand illegally out of the district to other parts of MP. On March 8, 2012, he was alerted of illegally mined stones being dispatched in a tractor. When he reached the spot to intervene, Singh was run over by the tractor and he died on the spot.

5. Sanjiv Chaturvedi

As an Indian Forest Services (IFS) officer, Sanjiv Chaturvedi is well-known for exposing illegal tree felling by the contractors involved in the construction of Hansi Butana canal in Uttarakhand in 2002. After various postings, he was made the Chief Vigilance Officer at the All India institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). At AIIMS, Chaturvedi took action against the doctors who took unauthorised foreign trips and revealed illegal activities involving higher authorities. Between 2012 and 2016, during his tenure at AIIMS, he investigated around 200 corruption cases. Currently, he is working as the Chief Conservator of Forest at Haldwani in Uttarakhand.

6. Vijay Pandhare

Vijay Pandhare was the Chief Engineer in the Maharashtra Water Resource department. In 2012, he made news for exposing corruption in the irrigation projects in the state. Pandhare wrote to the Chief Minister about financial irregularities in the irrigation projects, pointing out that while Rs 120 billion was spent on lift irrigation, 99 percent of the total 227 projects in the state were non-functional. The letter led to the resignation of the deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar.

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