Shawdesh desk:

There is no progress even a month after the Anti-Corruption Commission initiated a probe into the whereabouts of some 30,000 missing applications submitted to seek approval for building constructions under the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha.

The applications placed to the Rajuk seeking approvals for building plans between May 2019 and December 6, 2022 have gone missing from the National Data Centre, according to Rajuk officials.

The ACC on March 5 formed a three-member committee, headed by its director for system analysis Rajib Hasan, to inquire if any corruption took place in connection with the documents going missing following a suo motu High Court directive issued on January 2.

The other two committee members are ACC deputy director Suvas Chandra Dutta and assistant director Ashiqur Rahman.

ACC officials on Saturday told New Age that there was no progress in the inquiry since the formation of the committee.

They said that the probe committee was likely to issue a letter to the chairman of the Rajuk today seeking the list of officers who were responsible for preserving and protecting the documents.

The High Court on January 2 asked the ACC to submit the probe report to it within four months.

The court also asked the Rajuk chairman to take appropriate action against those involved in the loss of the 30,000 documents.

The court also set May 2 for passing a further order on the issue.

The bench of Justice Md Nazrul Islam Talukder and Justice Khizir Hayat issued the directive suo motu on January 2 after taking cognisance of a report carried by the daily Prothom Alo on December 29, 2022 under the headline ‘Documents of 30,000 clients go missing from Rajuk website’.

Senior ACC lawyer Khurshid Alam Khan submitted a copy of the newspaper to the court and prayed for issuing a suo motu directive.

Khurshid told the court that the loss of 30,000 documents was a matter of grave concern.

The Rajuk chairman should explain to the court on how the documents went missing, he argued.

Asked to comment over the HC directive, Khurshid Alam on Saturday said that the ACC in a letter on March 5 informed him that it had formed a three-member committee to probe over the missing documents.

The committee was asked to submit its probe report to the ACC within the timeframe, Khurshid said quoting the letter.

Khurshid said that the ACC might seek further time from the court to complete the probe as it needed to find out the documents.

‘We will inform the High Court from time to time about the progress, if any, about the probe,’ he added.

Rajuk chairman Md Anisur Rahman Miah earlier told New Age that they had  started working on recovering the documents submitted online when they came to know about the matter.

Anisur claimed that it was not the Rajuk’s fault as the documents went missing from the National Data Centre in Gazipur.

‘No hard copies went missing from the Rajuk…We have already recovered the missing application forms, but we are yet to recover the images and other documents uploaded to the server,’ he said.

Anisur added that they had filed a general diary and given letters to the National Data Centre authorities and to the senior secretary of information and communication technology ministry.

‘We have already sought help from the computer science department at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology to investigate how the data went missing, how they could be recovered and how the recurrence of such incidents could be avoided,’ he said.