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NCB’s Sanjay Singh, who gave clean chit to Aryan Khan, takes voluntary retirement
Sanjay Kumar Singh told HT that he had decided to take voluntary retirement due to personal reasons. “I have had a fruitful career,” he said
NEW DELHI: Sanjay Kumar Singh, the Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who led a special investigation team (SIT) of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) to probe Aryan Khan’s role in the Cordelia drugs raid case and found him innocent, has taken voluntary retirement from the service for “personal reasons”.
Singh, a 1996 batch IPS officer from the Odisha cadre, was deputy director general (DDG) of NCB at Mumbai. Singh applied for VRS on February 29 this year, almost a year before he was to retire from service in January 2025. His request was approved by the state government on April 16.
“I have had a fruitful career. I decided to take voluntary retirement due to personal reasons,” Singh told HT.
Known to follow the law in letter and spirit, Singh handled several high-profile cases during his stint in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) between 2008 and 2015, including corruption charges against former Haryana chief minister O P Chautala, Commonwealth Games 2010 corruption case, irregularities in Medical Council of India (MCI), and a recruitment scandal in Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) among others.
Singh’s boss, NCB director general SN Pradhan said: “Sanjay Singh is a committed professional who excelled at every place he worked. His investigation skills were very thorough. It’s a loss for the NCB but during his time here, he has been an asset for us”.
People who have worked closely with him said Sanjay Kumar was known to build his cases against the accused with strong documentary, corroborative and scientific evidence, and followed legal procedures and guidelines laid down by various courts to take a case to its logical conclusion.
Before joining the NCB in January 2021, Singh was Odisha’s additional director general of police overseeing the state police’s task force against drugs. He has previously served as commissioner of police, Bhubaneswar.
During his probe into the Aryan Khan case, Singh made multiple visits to Mumbai to oversee the probe by his team and scrutinised all statements, following which the special team concluded that there was no evidence to charge the youngster.
The probe convinced the Centre to recommend action against NCB’s former zonal director Sameer Wankhede and dropping drug trafficking charges against six people, including Aryan Khan.
