A sensational attempt to kill IAS officers, senior government officials, visitors and employees was foiled by an alert sweeper at the Sachivalaya on Monday morning.
A sensational attempt to kill IAS officers, senior government officials, visitors and employees was foiled by an alert sweeper at the Sachivalaya on Monday morning.
When he arrived for duty at the Energy & Petrochemical Department on the fifth floor of block No 5 of the state secretariat, the sweeper found that the lock of the water cooler’s cover was broken and someone had laced the drinking water in the cooler with deadly anti-termite pesticide. He found another sachet of the pesticide in the water cooler and an empty 500-gm sachet of the pesticide on the floor behind the machine.
Incidentally, Block No 5 is adjacent to Block No 1 where the offices of chief minister Narendra Modi and the members of his cabinet are located. Senior bureaucrats, including IAS officer S Jagdeesan, sit on the fifth floor of this block which houses key departments such as Industries and Education and is visited by hundreds of high-profile visitors every day.
The news about the poisoning of the drinking water in the water cooler spread like wildfire and caused widespread panic among the government employees. Strangely, no senior official of the Energy and Petrochemical Department or of the Secretariat Security Department has taken care to lodge a police complaint about the incident.
The employees of the department held a meeting and gave a written complaint to the department’s principal secretary, S Jagdeesan, requesting him to order that a police complaint be lodged in the matter. Jagdeesan, however, declined. According to sources, he allegedly said that a complaint should not be lodged because the political atmosphere was surcharged because of the forthcoming elections.
The employees of the department, however, were so panic-stricken that they gave a written complaint to the Gujarat Sachivalaya Staff Federation. The federation is another association of government staff.
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