Two ex-bureaucrats summoned over disappearance of inquiry reports from Odisha CMO

Bhubaneswar: The Commissionerate Police, probing the alleged disappearance of two important inquiry commission reports from the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), has summoned former IAS officer Rajesh Verma and ex-IT Secretary Manoj Mishra.

The officers have been asked to appear before the investigating officer within three days to provide details on the missing files.

Verma, a 1987-batch retired IAS officer, served as Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister from 2017 to 2019. Mishra, a former IRTS officer, was appointed as principal secretary of the Electronics and Information Technology department on a contractual basis in 2022 a day after the the Ministry of Railways accepted his resignation. He oversaw key databases and IT operations, before resigning from the post following the change of government in June 2024.

The controversy surrounding the reports landed in the Capital police station following an FIR lodged by Home Department Joint Secretary Sarat Chandra Marandi on June 10, under several provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) including criminal breach of trust, conspiracy, and destruction of official records. The missing documents are the Justice A S Naidu Commission report on the 2008 killing of VHP leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and his associates at Jaleshpeta Ashram in Kandhamal district, an incident that sparked widespread communal violence, and the Revenue Divisional Commissioner’s inquiry into the 2016 fire tragedy at a private hospital in Bhubaneswar, which claimed over 20 lives and highlighted serious regulatory failures.

Sources said that the former bureaucrats may have been summoned to trace the movement of the physical register books, dispatch logs, and signatures. Police are also investigating whether there were digital copies, backups, or system logs of the files, and if any hard drives or digital databases were wiped or altered.

In the last 35 days, physical and digital logs and dispatch numbers along with CCTV footage within Lok Seva Bhawan were examined and departmental staff were questioned, the sources added.