Rajkot, Sep 23: Retired IAS officer Pradip Sharma was arrested on Thursday in a case of allegedly causing loss to the state exchequer by illegally allotting a piece of government wasteland to a farmer in Bhuj during his tenure as the collector of Kutch between 2003 and 2006.
He will be produced in the court with a demand for remand in this matter.
A first information report (FIR) was registered on Thursday against Sharma, a 1984-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer by Kalpana Gondia, mamlatdar of Bhuj town at CID border zone police station at Bhuj in Kutch district.
According to media reports, Pradeep Sharma has been accused of selling crores worth of government land in Bhuj to an illegal private person. In this land allotment case , Bhuj CID Crime arrested Pradeep Sharma from Ahmedabad and builder Sanjay Shah from Vadodara. After the arrest, he will be presented in the court this evening with a demand for remand. The former collector was earlier arrested in March.
Sharma has been facing nearly a dozen criminal cases and the latest case comes around a month after he was convicted and sentenced to one month of imprisonment for keeping a mobile phone in jail.
The retired IAS officer, who is presently lodged in Palara Special Jail near Bhuj, the district headquarters of Kutch, has been booked under IPC section 217.