Chhattisgarh HC acquits health clerk in 2009 bribe trap after complainant admits he dealt with another clerk

Justice Ravindra Kumar Agrawal set aside a ten-year-old conviction under the Prevention of Corruption Act, finding that the complainant had dealt only with another clerk, that the ACB told him whom to name in the complaint, and that an unclear tape recording with no voice identification and no Section 65-B certificate could not prove demand.

A clerk at the Directorate of Health Services in Raipur who was caught in an Anti Corruption Bureau trap in August 2009 with Rs 5,000 in phenolphthalein-coated notes in his trouser pocket has been acquitted by the Chhattisgarh High Court, seventeen years after the trap and ten years after his conviction. Justice Ravindra Kumar Agrawal, sitting singly at Bilaspur, held on 28 October 2026 that the prosecution had “utterly failed to prove the demand made by the appellant” once the complainant himself testified that he had negotiated the bribe with a different clerk, had never met the accused before the day of the trap, and had named the accused in his written complaint only because the ACB officers told him to.

A leave file, two clerks and a complaint written to order

Prakash Jaiswal, also written Prakash Jayaswal, was an Assistant Grade-II at the Directorate in 2009. The complainant, Binu Raj (PW-2), was the husband of Sunita Raj (PW-1), a Women Multipurpose Health Worker posted at the Community Health Centre, Keshkal, who had been on leave from 20 July 2007 to 22 May 2008 on medical grounds. Her application for settlement of 113 days of earned leave travelled from the Block Medical Officer at Keshkal to the Chief Medical and Health Officer at Jagdalpur and then to the Directorate at Raipur.

The prosecution case, as framed in the charge, was that Jaiswal demanded Rs 1,000 when the couple approached him, took it, asked for Rs 1,000 more a month later, and fixed Rs 8,000 as the price for completing the work. On 3 August 2009 he allegedly telephoned Sunita Raj to say the orders had been obtained and asked her to come to the Directorate the next day at noon with the Rs 8,000. Binu Raj instead went to the ACB at Raipur on 4 August 2009 and gave a written complaint (Ex.P/2). A trap party was assembled the same day. Ten notes of Rs 500 were dusted with phenolphthalein, placed in the complainant’s trouser pocket, and he was handed a micro cassette recorder. He went into Jaiswal’s office room, came out some time later, and signalled near a State Bank ATM in the Old Mantralaya campus. The trap party caught Jaiswal there, his hand wash turned pink, the notes were recovered from his pocket, and the State Forensic Science Laboratory (Ex.P/34) later confirmed phenolphthalein and sodium carbonate on the articles.

The Special Judge (Prevention of Corruption Act) and First Additional Sessions Judge, Raipur, convicted him on 18 October 2016 in Special Criminal Case No. 28 of 2009 under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d) read with 13(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, and sentenced him to one year of rigorous imprisonment with a fine of Rs 5,000 on each count, the sentences to run concurrently. In his statement under Section 313 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Jaiswal had said he neither demanded nor accepted a bribe and that the money Binu Raj gave him was a loan amount obtained by one Ashok Ramteke, something he said he had explained to the ACB officers at the time.

The complainant’s own evidence pointed at Ramteke Babu

Kashif Shakeel, for Jaiswal, argued that none of the three ingredients of the offence, demand, acceptance and recovery, had been proved. The ACB had acted within hours of the complaint without any verification or preliminary enquiry, no call detail records were filed, the second panch witness L.P. Patel was never examined, nobody had proved that the leave file fell within Jaiswal’s competence, and there was no voice sample or frequency test to show that the voices on the tape were those of the complainant and the accused. Atanu Ghoash, Deputy Government Advocate, answered that a same-day trap is not illegal, that the recovery and the pink hand wash corroborated the complainant, and that the accused had failed to establish any probable defence.

The judgment turns almost entirely on what Binu Raj said in the witness box. In his examination-in-chief he said that when he and his wife came to the Directorate they met one Ramteke Babu, a clerk posted in the Nursing Cell, who demanded Rs 1,000 and asked for Rs 8,000 more after the work was done. He paid the Rs 1,000 to Ramteke. On 3 August 2009 it was Ramteke who telephoned his wife, said the work was complete, and told him that since he would be on leave the next day the money should be given to Prakash Jaiswal. Binu Raj then went to the ACB. As the court recorded his evidence, the officers asked him to give a complaint in the name of the person who was working in place of Ramteke Babu, and the written complaint against Jaiswal (Ex.P/2) followed.

Inside the office room on 4 August, according to his own account, he telephoned Ramteke, who told him to hand the amount to Jaiswal and collect the copy of the order. He said he had only Rs 5,000; Ramteke asked for the full Rs 8,000. He gave Rs 5,000 to Jaiswal and went towards the ATM to withdraw the remaining Rs 3,000, where he gave the signal. In cross-examination he admitted that the leave file was being dealt with by Ramteke, that he had never met or spoken to Jaiswal before that day, that he had told the ACB officers exactly that, and that it was the officers who insisted he lure Jaiswal out of the office room on the pretext of finding the ATM. When he told Jaiswal that Ramteke had said to give him the money, Jaiswal professed ignorance. He admitted that the tape was not played at the Directorate or at the ACB office that day, that when it was heard the next day it was not clear, and that he signed various documents the following day without knowing what they were. He then stated, in terms, that the appellant never demanded any bribe from him and never accepted one.

Justice Agrawal held that once the complainant said this, the alleged demand itself fell under suspicion. Ramteke, with whom the complainant had actually negotiated, was never made an accused. From the whole of the complainant’s evidence, the court found, Jaiswal was unaware of the conversation between Binu Raj and Ramteke, had neither demanded a bribe nor had any pending work on the file.

Sunita Raj, the panch witness and the investigating officer

The other witnesses did not repair the damage. Sunita Raj (PW-1) did say in chief that the clerk Prakash Jaiswal demanded Rs 1,000 to forward the file and Rs 8,000 after the order, but in cross-examination she admitted that the order on her leave application had already been passed when she executed the consent letter (Ex.P/1) in her husband’s favour, that the consent letter mentions no demand, that she had made no complaint to any superior officer, that she did not know of any Ramteke, and that her husband had got two other persons trapped. The investigating officer, Inspector Jayrol Lakda (PW-12), confirmed that she never made any complaint to the ACB herself.

The panch witness M.P. Kashyap (PW-7) was summoned at about 11 am on 4 August and reached the ACB office at noon. He did not verify the complaint; the officers told him it had been verified already. He was not told of any plan before leaving for the Directorate, was never told that a recording would be made, could not identify the voices on the tape, did not know what the conversation was about, and admitted that the person who had demanded the bribe from Binu Raj had no authority over the file. He said the transcript (Ex.P/6) was prepared at 3.45 pm in an office room on the first floor of the Mantralaya campus by a lady employee who was not a member of the trap party, and that when the officers caught hold of Jaiswal he protested that he had taken no money and was being falsely implicated. Inspector Bhagwan Singh Rathore (PW-10), another member of the trap party, said the transcript was prepared and the tape heard near the ATM, and conceded that there had been no preliminary verification of the complaint.

Lakda’s cross-examination went further. He admitted that complaints are ordinarily verified before a trap, but this one was not, because, as the preliminary panchnama (Ex.P/5) recorded, the complainant said that taking the recorder to the accused would arouse suspicion. No call details were obtained, though he agreed that the call details could have verified whether the accused ever spoke to the complainant’s wife, and he could not say why that was not done. Until 2.25 pm he did not even know where the transaction was to take place. The Directorate’s reply (Ex.P/23) said that in the Nursing Cell Jaiswal and Ramteke worked jointly on the file, and he did not know who had written the notesheet, or whether Ramteke was on leave that day. No panchnama recorded that the cassette was blank when handed over. He could not identify the voices, said the recording was not clear, and admitted that the transcript contains no mention of any demand of Rs 4,000, Rs 5,000 or Rs 8,000 and nothing about the negotiation or the trip to the ATM. Dr Alka Gupta (PW-11), the Deputy Director who proved the posting and work-distribution document, said all work in the section was done jointly and she could not say who dealt with Sunita Raj’s file. Deputy Superintendent Lochan Pandey (PW-5), who registered the FIR, did not know why the Dehati Nalishi reached him only on 6 August, two days after the trap.

An unidentified voice, an unclear tape and no Section 65-B certificate

The court set out the law on demand at length. From Mukhtiar Singh v. State of Punjab, (2013) 14 SCC 153, and the passages it adopted from P. Satyanarayana Murthy, proof of demand is the gravamen of Sections 7 and 13(1)(d), and mere recovery without it will not sustain a conviction. From the Constitution Bench in Neeraj Dutta v. State (NCT of Delhi), (2023) 4 SCC 731, demand and acceptance must be proved as a fact in issue, by direct or circumstantial evidence, before any presumption under Section 20 can be raised, and the Supreme Court had reiterated the same this year in Jaswinder Singh v. State of Punjab, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 1952. The judgment also drew on State of Kerala v. C.P. Rao, (2011) 6 SCC 450, B. Jayaraj v. State of A.P., (2014) 13 SCC 55, RPS Yadav v. CBI, (2015) 11 SCC 642, Sejappa v. State, (2016) 12 SCC 150, and N. Vijay Kumar v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2021) 3 SCC 687, each holding that recovery of tainted money divorced from proof of demand is not enough. B. Jayaraj was especially close on its facts: there too the complainant had disowned the demand alleged in his initial complaint, and the Supreme Court held that neither his testimony nor the complaint could then be used to prove it.

On the tape, the court applied Rajesh Gupta v. State through CBI, 2022 (2) SCR 864, which restates the Ram Singh v. Col. Ram Singh conditions: a tape-recorded conversation is admissible only if the voice is identified by the maker of the record or by others who recognise it, the accuracy of the recording is proved, tampering or erasure is totally excluded, and the voice is clearly audible. None of that had been done. No witness knew Jaiswal’s voice, no voice sample or frequency test was taken, and by the investigating officer’s own account the recording was unclear and silent on any amount. In those circumstances, Justice Agrawal held, the “possibility of tampering with the tape-recorder and alleged conversation cannot be ruled out”. He added a second, independent ground: in the absence of a certificate under Section 65-B of the Evidence Act, the evidence of a digital tape recorder is not admissible, citing Sanjay Singh Ramrao Chavan v. Dattatray Gulabrao Phalke, (2015) 3 SCC 123, where the Supreme Court refused to rely on a translated transcript of a recording that the forensic laboratory had found inaudible and whose source had never been analysed.

Pulling the threads together, the court found that the prosecution had proved neither the verification of the complaint, nor any conversation between Jaiswal and the complainant, nor any demand by Jaiswal, nor that the recorded voice was his; and even the recorded conversation disclosed no bribe amount. With the complainant himself saying that he had never met the accused before the transaction and that the accused demanded nothing, demand could not be said to have been proved beyond reasonable doubt, and on the Supreme Court authorities acceptance and recovery alone could not carry the conviction.

Order

Criminal Appeal No. 1332 of 2016 was allowed on 28 October 2026, after being reserved on 13 October 2026. The judgment of conviction and order of sentence dated 18 October 2016 passed by the Special Judge (Prevention of Corruption Act) and First Additional Sessions Judge, Raipur, in Special Criminal Case No. 28 of 2009 was set aside and Prakash Jaiswal was acquitted of the offences under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d) read with 13(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, on the benefit of doubt. He was reported to be on bail; his bail bond is to remain in force for six months under Section 481 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. The trial court record is to be sent back forthwith with a copy of the judgment for compliance. The judgment is marked not approved for reporting.