Andhra Pradesh: Female officials less likely to accept bribes than men
Visakhapatnam: The number of women officials nabbed as primary accused or intermediaries in bribery cases and disproportionate assets cases by the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) in Andhra Pradesh, is minuscule. However the ACB officials say that the number has been slowly increasing in Andhra Pradesh, but the percentage of women accused of bribery and corruption is less than five percent.
It has been raining crorepatis for the Andhra Pradesh ACB for the past three years as over 480 tainted officials were netted by the ACB for amassing illegal assets over and above their known source of income and for demanding and accepting kickbacks for doing officials favours between 2015 and 2017.
"Corruption is corruption, whether it is Rs 1 or Rs 100 crore. Similarly, a case is a case for us and we don’t see the gender when it comes to arresting the tainted official for amassing illegal assets or accepting bribes from people.
However, it is a fact that the number of women getting booked in graft cases and disproportionate assets cases has gone up slightly but the number of tainted women officials is still very low when compared to the men who have been arrested by the ACB in the past few years," said the DG of the ACB RP Thakur.
The DSP of ACB’s Central Investigation Unit (CIU) Ramadevi said that they have unearthed over Rs 5.6 crore (the market value is estimated to cross Rs 50 crore value) of disproportionate assets amassed by Uppada Swarajya Lakshmi, District Medical and
Health Officer (DMHO) of Kurnool district, in December 2016. Swarajya Lakshmi is a rare case -- the first woman officer in the recent past who was arrested for amassing illegal assets, she added. A senior officer with ACB said that in some cases when the women were caught, it was found that their husbands were involved as middlemen. Similarly, in most of the cases when the men were caught, it was found that most of the illegal assets were in the name of their wife or someone, they added.
