A 27-year-old IIM grad was shot to death outside Lucknow last weekend for trying to cleaning up corruption in the gas station industry. Manjunath Shanmugam’s heinous murder shows no good deed goes unpunished:
The IIM Lucknow graduate from Karnataka paid with his life on Saturday afternoon for his crusade against corrupt petrol pump owners… Manjunathan… had become a “nightmare” for Sitapur’s petrol outlets, always dropping in for surprise checks as part of his company’s campaign against adulteration, sources said.
A month ago, he had sealed the Manu Mittal petrol station in Gola on Sitapur Road and blacklisted several others… The police believe that several petrol outlet owners had plotted together to kill Manjunathan… Adulteration of oil — especially diesel - at petrol pumps is a longstanding problem across the country. Diesel is mixed with kerosene, which is subsidised for the poor. [Link]Nathan’s body was recovered from a vehicle in Sitapur district this morning. The vehicle, a Maruti car, reportedly belongs to… the son of Sulakshan Mittal whose petrol pump in Gola area of Lakhimpur district had been sealed by Nathan. [Link]
Having not heard from his son for three days… the father… sent an SMS: ”How are you?” … that evening, Manjunath was beaten up and then riddled with at least six bullets. His body was found in the backseat of his own car. At the wheel, were two employees of the petrol pump, on their way to dispose of the body…
“He was killed for doing his duty,” said a tearful Shanmughan after the cremation. ”He told me many times that he was working in an area with many mafia gangs and that anything could happen to him… He said it is a lawless world and for survival, one has to keep mum even if there are irregularities,” said Shanmughan. [Link]
Indians are bitter:
I am never going to ask another IIM/IIT guy to stay back in India. I always resented the fact that some of our best brains always grew wings and flew out of our country. Not any more….Youths who dare to live for country are killed, and who live for themselves, India call them home and honors them…
It would be interesting to track what happens to the culprits… most pumps in UP are political gifts given by politicians to their goons… [Link]
Gaurav Sabnis remembers Shanmugam:
People always crib about how IIM grads never do anything for the country or don’t join PSUs. Here was one IIM grad who joined a PSU. Did his work honestly and in the right way… And he was murdered in cold blood…
Manju was one of the well known faces on campus… He was the booming voice of “3.4”, our campus band… That cold morning, we got talking… part of his job was to inspect samples from petrol pumps, and report back to the company. The petrol pumps were ideally supposed to adhere to very high standards of purity. But he said the adulteration in the petrol pumps in UP, where he was posted, was usually so rampant, it’s a wonder even a single petrol pump was functioning… He said the reason why this adulteration happened so brazenly was that the dealers knew that no matter what happens, their licenses couldn’t be cancelled. If everyone does it, how many pumps will the company shut down? [Link]
The gas industry is in revolt:
The Oil Sector Officers’ Association threatened to go on an indefinite nation-wide strike from Thursday if the new oil marketing discipline guidelines are not withdrawn and those behind IOC executive B.S. Manjunathan’s murder arrested by then. OSOA president Ashok Singh said the government has been asked to “scrap immediately” the 2005 guidelines which place the entire responsibility of controlling adulteration on sales officers of oil companies…
Singh had earlier said officers of oil companies in Uttar Pradesh would observe a bandh tomorrow to protest the murder. This would be followed by a nation-wide strike the next day if the demands are not met… Singh said it was not possible for an oil company sales officer to carry out the responsibility the new guidelines had thrust on him as he had to supervise over 50 retail outlets stretching over a 300-sq-km area.
He said oil companies would have to be backed by state governments if adulteration had to be effectively checked. The weights and measures department of the state government and the police would have to back the efforts, he added. [Link]
Shanmugam’s was not the first life taken:
Manjunathan’s murder comes almost exactly two years after another young man, IIT Kanpur graduate Satyendra Dubey, was murdered after writing to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee about corruption… Dubey, a National Highway Authority of India engineer posted in Gaya, Bihar, was gunned down after threatening to expose collusion between NHAI officials and private contractors. A CBI probe concluded Dubey had been killed by highway robbers… [Link]
