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Former civil surgeon A.D.N. Prasad is in the middle of controversy yet again, as a team formed by the deputy commissioner has begun a probe into illegal sale of construction material of a demolished decades-old building on the sadar hospital premises.
The three-member team inspected the hospital Saturday evening and later expressed dissatisfaction over the lack of maintenance of documents in the civil surgeon’s office, now held by Binay Kumar after Prasad was transferred to West Singhbhum in the same capacity in the last week of July.
According to sources at the hospital, Prasad secretly sold building material, including expensive wood, furniture and iron grills, to a vendor in May. The materials were remnants of a double-storeyed building, set up in 1930, which served as the residential quarters of employees before it was pulled down in January.
Sources said the sale fetched over Rs 2 crore though the civil surgeon should have floated tenders and invited bidders before taking such a step.
Prasad had run into trouble in February when he allegedly misbehaved with employees and was assaulted by Barhi MLA Uma Shankar Akela accusing him of neglect leading to the death of a youth in the hospital last year.
Deputy superintendent Binay Kumar took over from Prasad, who had served in Hazaribagh for eight months.
When the sale of items from the razed building came to light, Hazaribagh deputy commissioner Manish Ranjan formed a team of IAS officer Rahul Kumar Sinha, deputy collector Vidhan Chandra and executive magistrate Ram Narayan Singh to probe the matter.
Yesterday, the team also summoned a clerk, Sudhir Kumar, who was accused by former civil surgeon V.K. Prasad of hatching a conspiracy against him. The former civil surgeon was beaten up in his chamber by a group of men two years ago.
Sudhir Kumar was transferred to Giridih two weeks ago. But sources said the clerk deleted several important documents from the civil surgeon’s official laptop before leaving. When the probe team questioned him, he said that he had transferred all the documents from the laptop into a pen drive. When the team members charged him of dereliction of duty, he remained quiet.
The trio said they would soon hand over a report to Ranjan. The DC told The Telegraph he would comment only after the probe was over.
Meanwhile, sources said that during his tenure, A.D.N Prasad was charged with malpractice, adding the ongoing inquiry would expose several scams starting from purchase of equipment to medicines.
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