On June 4, the Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) took a significant step by submitting a massive 17,500-page chargesheet against Subodh Agarwal, a retired IAS officer and the former additional chief secretary of the public health engineering department (PHED). This move reveals a major corruption scandal.
Agarwal led the department overseeing the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) initiatives from April 2022 until January 2024. Investigators allege that during this time, two companies—M/s Shri Ganpati Tubewell Company and M/s Shree Shyam Tubewell Company—secured contracts worth a staggering Rs 979 crore between 2021 and 2023 by using falsified documents, with the support of senior PHED officials.
To get the contracts, these companies reportedly presented fake work-completion certificates in the name of IRCON, a prominent public sector enterprise under the Railways ministry. On February 16, 2023, IRCON alerted Agarwal via email about the forged certificates. However, this warning was supposedly ignored, allowing the companies to obtain contracts for crucial infrastructure such as pipelines, pumps, and household tap connections in various districts.
Moreover, investigators claim that former superintendent engineer Mukesh Goyal, who is currently on the run, collaborated with Mukesh Pathak, a private office assistant at IRCON, to create the fake certificates and craft responses to PHED’s inquiries for verification.
