PATNA: Less than four months after the suicide of the district magistrate of Buxar in Bihar, his OSD and district land acquisition officer hanged himself to death on Sunday, causing anxieties in the administrative officials’ fraternity and prompting the Opposition parties to attack the government.
The body of Mohammad Tauqir Akram, an official of deputy collector rank, was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his rented house in the western Bihar town. Akram had served as the officer on special duty (OSD) of former Buxar DM Mukesh Pandey, a 2012-batch IAS officer who had committed suicide by throwing himself under a speeding train at Ghaziabad on August 10.
Buxar’s in-charge SP Avakash Kumar, who visited Akram’s residence after learning of his death, said a suicide note was found in his bedroom where he hanged himself. The terse note, written in red ink with a ball-point pen on a scrap of paper, said: “No one to be held responsible. My own wish to meet death”. The suicide note records the time of writing as 4:30 AM.
Akram’s ailing mother, Nargis, present in the house at the time, said the officer had sought a transfer and was being asked to pay a hefty bribe for it. She also said Akram was “under deep mental distress” as he was being paid half his salary for the past seven months due to a pending departmental inquiry against him.
“This (suicide) would not have happened if he had been transferred. But how could he have procured the hefty money (‘note ki gaddi’) for the transfer? Now finally they transferred him. They had made him rot in the past three years,” Nargis told journalists while sobbing uncontrollably.
Akram, who was transferred to Buxar from Mahua in May 2015, had been handling a number of departments in the district administration, including the land acquisition for the Patna-Buxar four-lane highway. His family originally hails from Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh.
CM Nitish Kumar condoled Akram’s death and ordered a probe into the suicide. Buxar ex-DM Mukesh Pandey had said in his elaborate suicide video clip that he was ending his life due to his sense of extreme frustration with human life and the marital problems he faced.