Rakesh Asthana (born 9 July 1961) is a retired

Indian Police Service The Indian Police Service ( IPS) is a civil service under the All India Services. It replaced the Indian Imperial Police in 1948, a year after India became Partition of India, independent from the British Raj. Along with the Indian Administ ...

(IPS). He is of the 1984 batch of Gujarat cadre who served as the Special Director at the

Central Bureau of Investigation The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is the premier investigating agency of India. It operates under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions. Originally set up to investigate bribery and governme ...

(CBI). In July 2021, he was appointed as Police Commissioner of Delhi. He retired on 31 July 2022 after an extension of 1 year.

Early life and education

Rakesh Asthana was educated at

Netarhat Residential School Netarhat Residential School is a school in Netarhat, India. The school has a record of producing toppers of the Bihar School Examination Board year after year. The students have dominated the Regional Mathematics Olympiad and National Talent S ...

Netarhat Netarhat is a hill station in Latehar district in the Indian state of Jharkhand. It is also referred to as the "Queen of Chotanagpur", and is a hill station. The town is also famous for Netarhat Residential School, set up in 1954. Geography ...

and at the St. John's College, Agra.

Career

Rakesh Asthana investigated the

Fodder Scam The Fodder Scam was a corruption scandal that involved the embezzlement of about from the government treasury of the north Indian state of Bihar.

, a corruption scandal that involved the

embezzlement Embezzlement is a crime that consists of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion of such assets, by one or more persons to whom the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific purposes. Embezzlement is a type ...

of about ₹9.4 billion in

Bihar Bihar (; ) is a state in eastern India. It is the 2nd largest state by population in 2019, 12th largest by area of , and 14th largest by GDP in 2021. Bihar borders Uttar Pradesh to its west, Nepal to the north, the northern part of West ...

. He filed a charge sheet against

Lalu Prasad Yadav Lalu Prasad Yadav (born 11 June 1948) is an Indian politician and president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). He is a former Chief Minister of Bihar (1990-1997), a former Railway Minister of India (2004-2009), and a former Member of Parliame ...

in 1996. Lalu was arrested for the first time in 1997. Asthana caught DGMS Director General taking bribes in Dhanbad. By that time, this was the first case of its kind in the whole country, when the officers of the Director-General had come under arrest. Rakesh also investigated the

2008 Ahmedabad bombings The 2008 Ahmedabad bombings were a series of 21 bomb blasts that hit Ahmedabad, India, on 26 July 2008, within a span of 70 minutes. Fifty-six people were killed and over 200 people were injured. Ahmedabad is the cultural and co ...

. Asthana had also examined the case of

Asaram Bapu Asumal Sirumalani Harpalani (born 17 April 1941), known by devotees as Asaram Bapu, is an Indian religious leader and convicted rapist, who started to come into the limelight in the early 1970s. By 2013, he was estimated to have established ov ...

and his son Narayan Sai. The absconding Narayan Sai was caught on the Haryana-Delhi border.

As Police Commissioner of Delhi

On 27 July, 2021, just four days before his superannuation, he was appointed as the

Commissioner of Police, Delhi The Commissioner of Police, Delhi or Delhi Police Commissioner is the head of the Delhi Police, the Law enforcement agency of the 15 police districts (as of January 2019) of National Capital of India, Delhi. Origins In the year 1966, the Gover ...

, succeeding Balaji Shrivastava who was acting as the Commissioner since the retirement of S.N. Shrivastava.

Controversy

The NGO, Common Cause, had approached Court challenging Asthana’s appointment as Special Director on the grounds that his name had figured in a 2011 diary seized from Sterling Biotech – a company being probed by the CBI for money laundering. Asthana was not named in the FIR but was presumably the subject of an ongoing investigation by his own agency. Asthana was entangled in a bribery controversy along with

Alok Verma Alok Kumar Verma (born 14 July 1957) is a former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation in India, who also served as Commissioner of Delhi Police and Director General of Tihar Jail. A 1979 batch IPS officer of the Arunachal Pradesh-Go ...

, Special Director CBI in a corruption scandal; both accused each other of bribery and subsequently asked to go on leave by the Government, on the recommendation of the

Central Vigilance Commission Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) is an apex Indian governmental body created in 1964 to address governmental corruption. In 2003, the Parliament enacted a law conferring statutory status on the CVC. It has the status of an autonomous body, f ...

. Verma and Asthana were sent on leave on the recommendation of the CVC by the Government of India. Verma went to the Supreme Court of India to appeal and Asthana to Delhi High Court. Supreme Court cancelled the decision to send Verma on leave and Verma was reinstated as CBI director two months later with the instruction that he not take any major decisions till the Selection Committee decides his fate over the corruption charges. The investigation by the CBI has been completed, giving Rakesh Asthana a clean chit, which was accepted by the Special CBI Court.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Asthana, Rakesh 1961 births Living people Indian Police Service officers Central Bureau of Investigation Alumni of the Netarhat Residential School People from Bihar Directors of the Central Bureau of Investigation