Earns just Rs 10,000 but senior wants Rs 4,000 from it

He is a daily wager engaged by the Military Engineering Services (MES) and earns just Rs 10,000 a month but his life has been put in immense hardship with an MES engineer allegedly snatching Rs 4,000 every month for the past five months.

The victim, Kuldeep Kumar, has now approached the CBI, which has registered an FIR against Junior Engineer Mohd Khursheed Ansari claiming that a discreet verification has found out that the demand of bribe was "true and genuine". Ansari could not be reached for his version.

According to the CBI, Kumar has been engaged by a private contractor Manjeet for the MES and is working in the refrigeration section of the MES in Jammu's Udhampur. He is placed under Ansari, who is a junior engineer.

"Ansari is demanding a bribe of Rs 4,000 per month from his monthly salary of Rs 10,000. He has so far paid a bribe of Rs 20,000 -- Rs 4,000 per month for the last five months," the CBI said in an FIR registered last week.

The CBI claimed that Ansari has also threatened him to remove from the job in case Kumar refused to play and he would be killed if he disclosed the demand for a bribe to anybody.

Kumar finds it difficult to run the family with meagre income as his wife is ill and has two children. "Added to this, the demand of bribe of Rs 4,000 per month by the said public servant is causing immense financial hardship to him," the FIR said.

The FIR said Kumar never wanted to pay the bribe but because of being not being educated enough, he knew nothing about the available legal remedy. "Because of his poverty, he kept paying bribe under compulsion against will," it said.

He decided to approach the CBI after coming to know that he can approach the agency in such cases. Kumar, in his complaint, told the CBI that he has given Rs 4,000 in June also but he did not want to do so.