Patna, Sept. 7: The vigilance department has become more watchful now. On an average, eight to 10 “corrupt” officials are being caught in the vigilance net every month and speedy trial of the trap cases has come as a booster for the two anti-corruption wings of the state government.

The confiscation of disproportionate assets of suspended IAS officer S.S. Verma seems to have sharpened the teeth of the vigilance department. Statistics available at the Vigilance Investigation Bureau revealed that till date, 58 persons have been booked on charges of corruption in the state since January this year.

Today, the bureau officials caught red-handed Shashi Kumar, an executive engineer posted with the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA), Nawada, while he was taking Rs 10,000 as bribe from one Ram Dev Prasad, a resident of Nawabganj village in the district for examining Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) documents.

Confirming the arrest of the executive engineer of the DRDA from Nawada, additional director-general (vigilance) Pramod Kumar Thakur said the arrested engineer was being brought to Patna from Nawada and would be produced in the special vigilance court in Patna after interrogation.

This is the third such trap case in a week.

On Tuesday, circle officer of Tankuppa in Gaya district Arun Kumar Singh was arrested by vigilance sleuths while taking a bribe of Rs 10,000 from Indradeo Prasad, a resident of Barsimha village, for removing encroachment from a portion of land.

Prior to these cases, Manoj Kumar, a manager of state food corporation (SFC) of Vaishali, had fallen in the vigilance trap. The state government recently announced to reward the people giving information about the ill-gotten money of corrupt bureaucrats and other public servants. In addition, special vigilance courts have been set up in Patna, Muzaffarpur and Bhagalpur for speedy trial of the trap cases.

Sources in the special vigilance unit (SVU), which was created by the Nitish Kumar government exclusively to nail top bureaucrats, said the unit had lodged six cases of disproportionate assets. While chargesheet has been submitted in five cases, including against former director-general of police Narain Mishra, the chargesheet against Verma was pending because of lack of prosecution sanction.

“With the confiscation of Verma’s property, the state government has given a practical demonstration of its anti-corruption law, which entails confiscation and attachment of property belonging to officials accused of corruption under the Bihar Special Courts Act, 2009,” a senior SVU official said.

The law empowers the state government to attach property even during the course of the investigation against an accused. The property can be returned only if the accused is acquitted of all charges, he clarified. However, the Supreme Court is yet to give its assent to the law after a bench stated this May that the accused person’s property could be confiscated “only after the offence was proved beyond reasonable doubt”.