Jharkhand officer caught red handed taking bribe on her very first posting

Officials from the anti-corruption bureau have caught a Jharkhand officer red-handed while taking a bribe. Incidentally, it was the first posting for the officer.

Mithali Sharma, an officer in the cooperative department of Jharkhand, was apprehended by the Hazaribagh Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) for accepting a bribe from a local organisation. In her first posting as an assistant registrar in Koderma, she had been working for eight months before her arrest.


On July 7, the ACB team caught her in the act of accepting Rs 10,000, the first installment of the Rs 20,000 bribe she had demanded from the Koderma Vyapar Sahyog Samiti. During a surprise inspection, she discovered some irregularities and threatened to take action against them.

Rameshwar Prasad Yadav, a member of the samiti, filed a complaint with the ACB DG after Sharma demanded the bribe. The ACB verified the complaint and set up a trap to catch her in the act.

Videos and photos capturing Sharma accepting the bribe have gone viral on social media, sparking public outrage. The ACB team took her to Hazaribagh for further legal proceedings, while an investigation into the matter is currently underway. An ACB official confirmed that Sharma was apprehended red-handed while accepting the bribe.

Corruption is one of the biggest issues in India and is quite rampant. Government officials are often accused of demanding bribe for even routine things. India ranks 85 in Transparency International's corruption index, which ranks countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and business people. In the index, which uses a scale of 0 to 100 to rank the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), India has a score of 40.

In its report, Transparency International said, "The case of India is particularly worrying. While the country’s score has remained stagnant over the past decade, some of the mechanisms that could help reign in corruption are weakening. There are concerns over the country’s democratic status, as fundamental freedoms and institutional checks and balances decay."