Engineer accused in the Rs5,000cr health scheme scandal commits suicide days after being grilled by CBI.
Engineer Sunil Verma, an accused in the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam, committed suicide on Monday at his residence here.
Police said he had shot himself with his licenced revolver around 8.30am. He was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead. Verma was a project manager in the Construction and Design Services wing of the UP Jal Nigam.
Lucknow police chief, DIG DK Thakur, told reporters that the CBI had raided Verma’s house on January 4. “He had been in great tension since then according to his family members,” the police official said. Prima facie, he said, the suicide seemed to have been triggered by this incident. “We have found a suicide note in which he has said that he had been honest in his work and had been greatly perturbed by the CBI raid,” Thakur said. The CBI had recently grilled Verma in the NRHM scam case. The engineer has said in his suicide note that no one should be blamed for his death and that he himself was responsible for taking this step.
Verma was named in the first FIR filed in the scam relating to upgradation of 134 hospitals across Uttar Pradesh for an amount of Rs13.4 crore by the C&DS. Former UP family welfare minister Babu Singh Kushwaha has also been named as an accused in the case. In its FIR, the CBI has alleged that contracts were given to a Ghaziabad-based firm on the basis of bogus and forged documents and the construction was of inferior quality which resulted in a loss of Rs5.46 crore to the state exchequer.
Meanwhile, the Congress has demanded a CBI inquiry into the alleged suicide. “The suicide is dubious and since the CBI is already investigating the NRHM scam, it should also probe Sunil Verma’s mysterious death,” UP Congress chief Rita Bahuguna Joshi said. “If the matter is left to the local police, they are sure to cover up the Mayawati government’s role in the case,” she added.
This is the fourth death related to the Rs5,000 crore NRHM scam in UP. Two Chief Medical Officers (CMO) posted at Lucknow have been murdered, and a Deputy CMO was found dead inside the Lucknow jail hospital under mysterious circumstances.
The Allahabad HC had directed the CBI to inquire into the misuse of NRHM funds following these murders. The CBI has carried out searches at the houses of various officials, including bureaucrats and businessmen associated with the family welfare department. The CBI has arrested eight people in this connection. The CAG has in its recent report also strongly indicted the state’s health and family welfare department, middlemen and contractors for allegedly siphoning off Rs5,700 crore of the Rs8,657 crore released between 2005 and 2011 under the NRHM.
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