Bhubaneswar: Odisha Vigilance officials arrested Akshaya Kumar Pattnaik, Senior Laboratory Technician of Tarva CHC in Sonepur district on Wednesday for allegedly demanding and accepting a bribe of Rs 9,000 from a complainant for a laboratory medical test report of the complaint and other poor villagers.
The medical tests are done free of cost in the CHCs on behalf of the government. However, Vigilance received several complaints that Pattnaik was regularly demanding money for such tests from poor villagers.
Acting on the complaints, Vigilance sleuths nabbed Patnaik red-handed on Wednesday while demanding and accepting a bribe of Rs 9,000 from the complainant for the latter’s blood test and that of 60 other villagers at Rs 150 for each test. The Vigilance sleuths had laid a trap to nab Pattnaik.
The bribe amount was recovered from the accused and seized.
Following the trap, simultaneous searches were launched at two locations related to Pattnaik to ascertain whether he had amassed wealth disproportionate to his known source of income.
In this connection, Sambalpur Vigilance has registered a case and an investigation is in progress against the accused Pattnaik.
