More trouble seems in store for the Mayawati government with the CBI on Thursday booking Pradeep Shukla, UP board of revenue member and a former principal secretary in the family welfare department, and five others over irregularities in the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam in the state.
The agency, which registered three new cases in the NRHM scam on Thursday, conducted searches at over 44 places in Uttar Pradesh, including Lucknow, Moradabad, Varanasi, Muzaffarnagar, Kanpur and Noida, as well as New Delhi. CBI sleuths raided the Civil Lines residence of former UP health minister Anant Mishra in Kanpur and the residences of Pradeep Shukla in Lucknow.
CBI sources said Mr Shukla, who was family welfare secretary during Babu Singh Kushwaha’s ministerial tenure, was named in all three new cases. The agency also collected some NRHM documents from the office of the chief medical officer, Allahabad. The total cost of projects in which these three cases were registered is over `250 crores, and mainly deal with construction and upgradation work at hospitals across the state, the sources said.