The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) on Wednesday conducted surprise inspections almost simultaneously at 53 police stations across Kerala in a bid to identify rogue officers who protect illegal sand miners and perpetrators of other environmental crimes.
They said preliminary reports from officers involved in ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ indicated that certain officers regularly let off lorries caught transporting illegally quarried river sand, an increasingly finite and pricy natural resource, after levying a small fine.
Ideally, the police should have impounded the trucks transporting the contraband and transferred their custody to the District Magistrate for further action. Some officers rarely inspected granite quarries in their jurisdiction, verified the stock and source of explosives and fuses.
Anti-corruption enforcers spent a better part of the day perusing station records, including petitions, first information reports, General Diary registers, cash books and applications for an array of services, including those for police clearance certificates.
They said some traffic enforcers were among the category of worst offenders. They sat on applications for accident occurrence reports submitted by citizens seeking to process their motor vehicle insurance claims.
However, some such applications were seen to have been processed fast and out of turn, giving rise to suspicion of entrenched corruption and the possible role of agents and middlemen at traffic stations.
Vehicles involved in accidents lay unattended at traffic stations for months due to the laxity on the part of officers to return them to their owners after due inspection by the Motor Vehicle Department.
Vigilance officers also found that enforcers had seized vehicles without proper reason. They also found scores of driving licences and vehicle registrations books kept illegally and without assigning any reason at traffic stations.
Investigators said accepted complaints from loan sharks without registering a case and used the petitions to pressurise debtors into repaying the high-interest loans. They told the requests confiscated from stations indicated that extra-judicial settlement of monetary and civil disputes was a significant avenue of corruption at police stations.
In Kozhikode, VACB officials found ₹70,000 missing from the cash chest. The money from petty fines was accounted for in the cash register though. Director, VACB, B. S. Muhammad Yasin led the operation.