Raju Narayanaswamy, IIT, IAS, Kerala¢s clean-up office

Raju Narayanaswamy, IIT, IAS, Kerala's clean-up officer
Rajeev P IPosted online: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 at 0000 hrs
Print EmailMan behind the resignation of Kerala Minister has taken
on the powers that be, including his father-in-law

Kochi, September 3: One subtle twist in a local district collector's
official probe report and T U Kuruvila, Kerala's land scam-tainted
public works minister, could probably have hung on in office — not
felled the way he was, today. But the Collector was Raju
Narayanaswamy. And that is saying a lot in Kerala.

This middle class Iyer from Changanassery, known for taking on
political
and other heavies like few IAS officers would dare, has
remained a pariah for most parties in Kerala's two political halves.
The brushes soon came to a point where he took on his father-in-law,
a big-time contractor, who wanted to block off a public road to a
poor neighbourhood of Scheduled Castes to wall up land for himself.

"I requested my father-in-law not to misuse my position as the local
Sub-Collector, but he wouldn't listen. I invoked the Criminal
Procedure Code and served orders on him, called in the police and
carried out the demolition," recounts the man who once led a raid on
the home of one of Kerala's politically influential liquor barons who
wouldn't pay up the Rs 11 crore that he owed the government in taxes,
and seized his belongings. A minister rang up, asking him to lay off
and return the seized stuff, Narayanaswamy refused and was on the
political hitlist yet again.


Controversies, and trouble, have always been with Narayanaswamy, the
topper of the 1991 IAS batch — he topped the SSC exams as well — and
a topper at IIT Chennai's computer science department who turned down
an MIT scholarship to enter the Civil Service. Nine years ago, he
bulldozed the sides of an important Thrissur road to widen it,
hitting businesses with clout who pulled strings to perpetually
harass him. Five years ago, he had a run-in with a prominent north
Kerala minister in Kasargod. Narayanaswamy refused to recommend
sanction as the local District Collector, to turn a hospital that the
minister owned into a private medical college, without prescribed
infrastructure.

Narayanaswamy says his run-ins are only because he can't help
being "stubborn" when things turn "unjustifiable. " Like when he
refused permission to a real-estate businessman to fill up a large
paddy farm — it would have deluged
some 50 poor village homes nearby
with waste from the adjacent government hospital. And when he refused
to sanction payment for a badly built earthen bund costing several
crores meant to help poor farmers — he was proved right when the bund
dissolved and vanished in the rains.

He was made to go on forced leave as managing director of the state
Marketing Federation (MARKETFED) after refusing to play ball with the
chairman, a senior politician. He was shunted to sinecure
assignments, even posted to work under junior officers.

When Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan wanted encroachers in Munnar
driven out, Narayanaswamy was one of the CM's three handpicked men.
Even senior CPM leaders objected to his choice but VS stood his
ground.

The Kuruvila affair is the latest. The Minister's children had taken
Rs 6.5 crore from an NRI businessman promising to sell him some prime
land, soon suspected
to be encroached. The sale did not happen, the
NRI went public while Kuruvila maintained everything was above board.
Narayanaswamy probed the land the Minister's children were to sell:
he reported that a good part of the land they purveyed was government
land, some suspectedly benami. Kuruvila could only agree to quit.