Ranchi, Jan. 21: Serious chinks are appearing in the state Vigilance Bureau over the Rs 45-crore seeds scam with a DSP probing the case resigning today, citing pressure from a senior to a give a clean chit to former principal secretary of the agriculture department during whose tenure embezzlement of funds had occurred.

DSP Mithilesh Kumar Singh, who was supposed to retire after three months, addressed his resignation letter to Vigilance Bureau SP Vipul Shukla, accusing the investigating agency's additional director-general of police (ADGP) Niraj Sinha of favouring A.K. Sarkar, one of the alleged masterminds of the scam.

According to Singh, despite glaring evidences against Sarkar, the ADGP had asked him to file a closure report before the court regarding his role. The scam flourished between 2005 and 2008 when Sarkar was the principal secretary of the agriculture department for a major period of time.

The Vigilance Bureau started investigations in 2009. Singh took over the case in the mid of 2014.

'For the past three months, I had been under pressure to give a clean chit to Sarkar and file a closure report before the court despite investigations revealing his role in the scam. I can't bear the pressure and hence decided to resign,' Singh told The Telegraph.

Denying the allegations, ADGP Sinha said: 'Nobody forced or ordered him (Singh) to give a clean chit to Sarkar. Investigations against Sarkar have not been closed, a fact already brought to the government's notice. In the past couple of months, I had directed Singh to arrest accused Pawan Kumar Agrawal, Ravindranath Agrawal and Pramod Agrawal, who acted as middlemen in the supply of seeds to farmers. Interrogations of Agrawals can give crucial clues into Sarkar's involvement, but Singh did not do anything to arrest them,' Sinha said.

He further claimed that in August last year, former Vigilance Bureau DIG Parmeshwar Ravi Dashad reviewed the case, but found no evidence against Sarkar that could be the basis of his prosecution.

'The former DIG found Sarkar guilty of dereliction of duty and said that the state government could conduct departmental proceedings against him. We had sought legal opinion from advocate-general last year on whether Sarkar can be prosecuted in the light of evidence gathered by DSP Singh. The opinion is yet to come,' Sinha said.

The case is being monitored by Jharkhand High Court. The Vigilance Bureau thrice submitted status reports before the court, but Dashad's report was never brought into court record.

'I feel that an unspoken parallel probe was instituted to safeguard Sarkar. As an investigating officer of this case, I was not given any official information about the former DIG's report nor it was brought to the notice of the court,' Singh stressed.

Sarkar, who retired last year, is now the member of Board of Revenue, Jharkhand.