CIDCO officer held in graft case over airport land rehab

Identified as Mukund Chandrakant Banda (51), the officer had demanded ₹seven lakh in order to provide eligibility certificate to the 51 year old complainant, whose land was acquired by CIDCO for the construction of Navi Mumbai International Airport.

Navi Mumbai

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The Anti Corruption Bureau of the Navi Mumbai police has caught red-handed a field officer working with CIDCO in a graft case for demanding a bribe of ₹seven lakh for providing a certificate regarding land acquired by the Corporation.

Identified as Mukund Chandrakant Banda (51), the officer had demanded ₹seven lakh in order to provide eligibility certificate to the 51 year old complainant, whose land was acquired by CIDCO for the construction of Navi Mumbai International Airport. According to the norms, CIDCO allocates land to rehabilitate villagers whose land has been acquired, and it was the officer’s responsibility to issue an eligibility certificate after verification of eligibility.

The complainant, a villager from Chinchpada village had been trying to get the eligibility verification done for many months in order to get allotment of the land by CIDCO as a part of the rehabilitation scheme.

“After the complainant approached us with the complaint, we verified the claims on March 13 and 14 and found that the accused had demanded ₹seven lakh from the complainant for himself and others in the CIDCO office. On Thursday, he was nabbed red-handed while accepting the first tranche of ₹three lakh at CIDCO Bhavan. A case would be registered with CBD Belapur police and we would then conduct house search of the accused. He is a resident of Uran,” Deputy Superintendent of Police, ACB, Jyoti Deshmukh told HT

Last year in the month of September, ACB Navi Mumbai unit had nabbed CIDCO’S superintendent engineer Prakash Mohile and CIDCO’s retired assistant executive engineer Sanjay Dekate (58) for accepting a bribe of ₹15,000.