The Whistleblower

A dream project of unparalleled importance to the Nation but in reality a great loot of public money because of very poor implementation

The term whistleblower derives from the practice of English bobbies, who would blow their whistles when they noticed the commission of a crime. The whistle would alert both law enforcement officers and the general public of danger.

The term ‘whistleblower’ has several meanings, but is usually used to refer to someone who alerts the authorities to misconduct from within an organisation.

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Today we will explore the ultimately tragic story of one such whistleblower.

Honestly Lay Bare asks many questions of its readers – one that it cannot answer is would it be prepared to go as far as Satyendra Dubey

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Satyendra Dubey, was born in 1973 at the village of Shahpur in Bihar, India. The family of five girls and two boys subsisted on a small piece of land.

Until the age of 15 he studied at the Gang Baksh Kanodiya High School Shahpur and joined junior college at Allahabad, about three hundred kilometers away.

Upon graduation from university he for some time, Dubey worked at the Ministry of Surface Transport in Delhi, before he was selected for the Indian Engineering Service, India's top engineering bureaucracy.

In July 2002 he was employed by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI).

Dubey became the Assistant Project Manager at Koderma, Jharkhand, responsible for managing a part of the Aurangabad-Barachatti section of National Highway 1. This highway was part of the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) Corridor Project, launched by the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which aimed to connect the metros of the country by four-lane limited-access highways totalling 14,000 km, at an overall cost more than USD 10 billion.

During this period, he got the contractor of the project to suspend three of his engineers after exposing serious financial irregularities. At one point, he had the contractor rebuild six kilometers of under-quality road

The GQ project had strict controls to ensure that the construction work would be carried on by experienced firms with proper systems. A second independent contract was given for supervision of the project. However, Dubey discovered that the contracted firm, Larsen and Toubro, had been quietly subcontracting the actual work to smaller low-technology groups, controlled by the local mafia.

When he wrote to his boss, NHAI Project Director SK Soni, and to Brig Satish Kapoor, engineer overlooking the supervision, there was no action.

In August 2003 when he was transferred to Gaya, a transfer which he opposed since he felt that it did not serve the interests of NHAI.

At Gaya, he exposed large-scale flouting of NHAI rules regarding sub-contracting and quality control. At this time he took a departmental test and was promoted as deputy general manager, which made him eligible to take charge as project director.

Meanwhile, faced with the possibility of high-level corruption within the NHAI, Dubey wrote directly to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, detailing the financial and contractual irregularities in the project.

While the letter was not signed, he attached a separate bio-data so that the matter would be taken more seriously. Despite a direct request that his identity be kept secret and its sensitive content that pointed fingers at some of his superiors, the letter along with bio-data was forwarded immediately to the Ministry for Road Transport. Dubey also sent the same letter to the Chairman, NHAI.

Soon Dubey received a reprimand: the vigilance office of NHAI officially "cautioned" Dubey for the impropriety of writing a letter directly to the Prime Minister. In the process, through connections in the NHAI and the Ministry, it is likely that the letter may have reached the criminal nexus running the highway construction projects in Bihar.

The letter said the NHAI officials showed a great hurry in giving mobilisation advance to selected contractors for financial consideration. "In some cases the contractors have been given mobilisation advance just a day after signing the contract agreement."

"The entire mobilisation advance of 10 per cent of contract value, which goes up to Rs 40 crore (USD 10 million) in certain cases, are paid to contractors within a few weeks of award of work but there is little follow up to ensure that they are actually mobilised at the site with the same pace, and the result is that the advance remains lying with contractors or gets diverted to their other activities," it said.

Dubey also highlighted the problems of sub-contracting by the primary contractors like Larsen and Toubro.

"Though the NHAI is going for international competitive bidding to procure the most competent civil contractors for execution of its projects, when it comes to actual execution, it is found that most of the works, sometimes even up to 100 per cent are subcontracted to petty contractors incapable of executing such big projects," he said. “Everyone in the NHAI is aware of the phenomenon of subcontracting but looked the other way.”

"A dream project of unparalleled importance to the Nation but in reality a great loot of public money because of very poor implementation at every state." wrote Dubey.

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On November 27, 2003, Dubey was returning from a wedding and called his driver to meet him at the station. He reached Gaya railway station at three in the morning, and found that his car was not able to come because of a battery malfunction.

It appears that at this point Dubey decided to take a rickshaw home. When he didn’t reach home, his driver went to look for him and found him dead by the side of the road in the suburb of A.P. Colony.

He had been shot.

Dubey had paid the ultimate price for his whistleblowing.