Puri: With a massive public outcry over the mysterious disappearance of the Srimandir Ratna Bhandar keys, a case has been filed in Puri SDJM court against District Collector Arvind Agarwal and former Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA) Chief Administrator Pradeep Jena.
The case was filed by lawyer and social activist from Puri, Chinmaya Dash alleging that both Agarwal and Jena have misled the government on facts relating to the missing keys and the ‘duplicate’ keys of the Ratna Bhandar found from the strong box of the District Record Room.
The complainant, in his FIR, has stated that the collector and the SJTA chief administrator had put the huge mass of devotees in the dark and they had also not taken the Orissa high court and the state government into confidence.
Agarwal is custodian of the inner Ratna Bhandar keys and his statement regarding recovery of the duplicate keys was false, baseless and fabricated as the Shree Jagannath Temple Rules, 1960, does not permit keeping duplicate keys.
The activist has further pointed out that this incident demonstrated the negligence of both Agarwal and Jena, and suppressing such a sensitive matter for over two months was a serious act of breach of trust and an offence in the eye of the law. The next hearing in the case has been fixed for June 25.
Notably, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had, June 4, ordered a judicial probe into the circumstances leading to non-availability of keys of the Ratna Bhandar, following which Justice Raghubir Das, retired judge of Orissa high court, was appointed as the chairman of the commission of inquiry.
It is worth a note here that a team of Puri district administration had found a set of ‘duplicate’ keys inside a sealed envelope in a strong box of the District Record Room June 17, further complicating matters and raising questions of suspected pilferage of money and other valuables of the temple.
