Rakesh Asthana | |
---|---|
Born |
Ranchi(Now in Jharkhand) Bihar |
9 March 1961
Alma mater | Jawaharlal Nehru University |
Police career | |
Department | Central Bureau of Investigation |
Country | India |
Years of service | 1984 |
Rakesh Asthana (born 1961) is an Indian Police Service officer of the 1984 batch of Gujarat cadre and is the Special Director at the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Rakesh Asthana completed his schooling from St. Xavier's School, Ranchi.
Rakesh Asthana was given the responsibility to investigate the Fodder Scam, a corruption scandal that involved the embezzlement of about ₹9.4 billion (equivalent to ₹34 billion or US$540 million in 2017) from the government treasury of the eastern Indian state of Bihar He filed a charge sheet against Lalu Prasad Yadav in 1996. Lalu was arrested for the first time in his time in 1997.
Asthana caught DGMS Director General taking bribes in Dhanbad. By that time, this was the first case of its kind in the whole country, when the officers of the Director-General had come under arrest.
Asthana had also examined the famous Godhra incident, which was constituted under the guidance of the Supreme Court, which was constituted under the leadership of RK Raghavan.
Rakesh was given the responsibility of investigating the bomb blast on July 26, 2008 in Ahmedabad. He had settled the case within 22 days. Asthana had also examined the case of Asaram Bapu and his son Narayan Sai. The absconding Narayan Sai was caught on the Haryana-Delhi border.
The NGO, Common Cause, had gone to court challenging Asthana’s appointment as Special Director on the grounds that his name had figured in a 2011 diary seized from Sterling Biotech – a company being probed by the CBI for money laundering. Asthana was not named in the FIR but was presumably the subject of an ongoing investigation by his own agency.