Neta steals file from civic office, hides inside shirt and walks away

KALYAN: It's usually amusing to see children hiding things inside their clothes. But now a video is being widely circulated among netizens of Ulhasnagar as it shows a 46-year-old BJP corporator folding a file and keeping it inside his shirt at the Ulhasnagar Municipal Corporation headquarters.
But, it's not funny because the incident happened in the PWD executive engineer's cabin, which Pradeep Ramchandani is not authorised to enter when the engineer is not in. And it has caused outrage as the cabin has files related to civic contracts and the ruling party corporator's son is a local contractor, working on three infrastructure projects totally worth nearly Rs14 crore.

Ramchandani, a second-term corporator, has now been arrested. Since M/S A M Ramchandani, a firm run by his son Rohit and mother Maya, have won UMC contracts, it's suspected that he may have stolen some file related to tenders- the civic body is yet to ascertain which document he had stolen. Last year, Ramchandani was in news for coming to blows with Sena corporators over a contract won by the latter's supporter.

In the CCTV footage that has gone viral, Ramchandani is seen sitting in the cabin with a junior engineer and a contractor, identified as Shashank Mishra, around 1.50 pm on May 10. After some discussions, the trio leave the cabin. But soon, Ramchandani returns alone, opens a cupboard, takes a file, folds it and hides it inside his shirt before leave the cabin.

UMC commissioner Ganesh Patil has ordered an internal probe to find out how Ramchandani had access to the cabin and he was not stopped from entering the room when no one was there.

Ankit Goel, Thane DCP-Zone 4, said, "Ramchandani has been arrested for theft and we are probing which file is missing." The opposition parties as well as citizens are demanding his disqualification of the ruling party corporator.

Kumar Ailani, chief of BJP's Ulhasnagar unit, said, "We have taken a serious note of the issue and initiated an internal probe. Action will be initiated against Ramchandani if he is found guilty."