Haryana town and planning dept sends draft chargesheet against IAS officer D Suresh

The IAS officer, D Suresh, who is Haryana Resident Commissioner in Delhi, is facing three inquiries by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in connection with plot allotment cases. The officer has termed the preliminary inquiries against him as “illegal” stating the same were conducted without “prior permission from the government”.

The bureau in 2019 had recommended departmental inquiry against the officer. However, in 2023, it also sought approval to launch an inquiry against Suresh under section 17-A of the Prevention of Corruption Act. An FIR has already been registered in this case and two people have been arrested.

The case relates to allocation of 1.5 acre in Gurgaon’s Sector 55 -56 to Springdales School Society for a primary school. On his part, D Suresh has justified his action. In a letter to the state chief secretary, Sanjeev Kaushal, on March 13 this year, the officer had urged the government to refrain the town and country planning department from sending the draft chargesheet against him.

According to the officer’s letter, the Chief Minister had sought parawise comments from the department on his (D Suresh) representation against the ACB inquiry.

In his letter, D Suresh wrote: “It is quite astonishing, rather painful, to observe that before submitting such parawise comments as directed by the chief minister, the additional chief secretary, town and country planning department has issued letter to the chief administrator, HSVP, seeking thereby a draft chargesheet, which certainly would have overriding effect on highest executive orders.”

The senior IAS officer also claimed that he had acted in quasi-judicial capacity strictly in compliance to a Punjab and Haryana high court order of 2018.

However, he claimed that a senor vigilance officer “deliberately concealed the same before the CM in order to gain orders for registering the inquiry in this case”.

“Even so, the CM had only approved a general probe into the irregularities in the office of town and country planning and office of chief administrator, HSVP. Thus, it was in no way a specific approval against the undersigned (D Suresh). It is also pertinent to note no SOP’s have been followed in the inquiries against the undersigned nor was any prior approval of preliminary enquiry sought from the government as required under section 17-A of Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.”

According to D Suresh, “he merely made out a case for allotment of an additional half an acre of land as pradhikaran (HSVP) had already allotted 1.5 acres of land in the past to the trust as the norms for establishing a primary school are 1.5 acres”.

An official of the town and country planning department, however, told The Indian Express that the department has just responded to the directions of the state government by sending a draft chargesheet to the authorities.