Odisha Vigilance Arrests ‘Crorepati’ Watershed Officer & 4 Aides For Siphoning Govt Funds

Bhubaneswar: The Odisha Vigilance on Friday arrested Malkangiri Watershed deputy director Santanu Mohapatra and four of his aides for allegedly helping him to accumulate assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.

They have been identified as assistant agriculture engineer Mohan Mandal, data entry operator Biswajit Mandal, contractual staffer Amiyakanta Sahu and Alekh Pradhan, who was operating a Jan Seva Kendra at Jagannathprasad in Ganjam and collecting bribes online from contractors and others on behalf of Mohapatra.

During simultaneous house searches on Wednesday, Vigilance sleuths unearthed a multi-storey building, 4 high value plots, gold weighting around 422 grams, deposits worth over Rs 91 lakh and Rs 2 crore in cash from his palatial house at Jeypore, the sources of which the watershed officer could not explain satisfactorily.

On Thursday, Mohapatra was brought to Bhubaneswar for inventory of his locker at SBI’s Kapilaprasad branch.

Further investigation revealed that Mohapatra and his colleagues allegedly siphoned off government funds by manipulating work completion records and making payments to the accounts of labourers which were subsequently withdrawn and misappropriated. A large number of passbooks of labourers were recovered during searches at the residences of Mandal and Sahu. Evidence of transfers done by Pradhan to the tune of more than Rs 1 crore from 2019 to 2024 was also gathered during the raids.