The Punjab Vigilance Bureau arrested former state minister Sadhu Singh Dharamsot on corruption charges in the early hours of Tuesday. The social welfare and forest minister in the previous Congress government was arrested from Amloh.
The arrest was made in connection with a scam in the forest department, which was headed by Dharamsot when he was the minister in the cabinet of Captain Amarinder Singh.
This came days after the arrest of district forest officer Guramanpreet Singh and a contractor Harminder Singh Hummy in a corruption case. According to sources quoted by PTI, both of them are learnt to have provided details of the alleged wrongdoings in the forest department when Dharamsot was the minister.
Guramanpreet Singh was arrested after a sting video in which he was seen seeking a bribe for the sale of illegal farmhouses in the vicinity of Chandigarh came to the fore.
Dharamsot was inducted by former Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh into his Cabinet as forests and social welfare minister. Dharamsot, who belongs to the Bazigar community, was defeated by AAP’s Dev Mann in the 2022 Assembly elections.
Earlier, Dharamsot’s name also appeared in an alleged post-Metric SC scholarship scam when the administrative secretary of the social welfare department Dripa Shankar Saroj had written to the then chief secretary Vini Mahajan about irregularities in funds.
The Centre had provided the state with Rs 303 crore for the SC scholarship fund. Saroj had alleged that Rs 248 crore was distributed in an arbitrary manner and Rs 39 crore was missing. Amarinder had ordered an inquiry which cleared Dharamsot.