Uttar Pradesh PWD contractor seeks President's nod to kill himself

A contractor in Uttar Pradesh has made a plea to the President of India for killing himself, saying he has been battling corruption in the state’s public works department. 

 

Satish Chandra Dixit, a contractor with the PWD Bareilly-Badaun division, said he has fought with the ‘mafia-officer nexus’ for years, but now wants to commit suicide with his family.

 

Dixit says he is being harassed for refusing to stay silent about the rampant corruption and tender manipulation that he witnessed firsthand. 

 

“Whenever I stood up for the truth, I was punished,” he writes in his letter to the President.

 

The contractor says what began as professional objections to departmental irregularities have spiralled into a systematic destruction, “mentally, financially, socially and physically".

 

At the heart of Dixit’s allegations is the claim that over the past eight years, the PWD has awarded contracts worth approximately Rs 100 crore to a single contractor, Javed Khan, at "arbitrary rates". Dixit has meticulously documented 33 separate works, creating a paper trail that he alleges reveals systematic favouritism and financial irregularities.

 

According to Dixit, these contracts were secured through fraudulent means, with fake documents being used to manipulate the tender process. When he raised objections to these practices, the retaliation was swift and merciless—he had to face professional blacklisting, false criminal cases, and mental harassment.

 

Dixit’s persistence eventually bore fruit when a Lokayukta investigation substantiated his claims. On September 19, 2023, six engineers were found guilty of 17 separate charges, with action recommended within three months. However, even after more than a year, no action has been taken against the guilty officials.

 

Even as Dixit found some relief through the courts, the harassment continued. The Allahabad High Court cancelled an adverse action order against him on May 27, 2025, but the very next day, a new case was registered against him, allegedly based on a fabricated incident. Another case followed on June 4, suggesting a coordinated effort to keep him entangled in legal proceedings.

 

“This entire system is trying to break me mentally,” Dixit states.

 

Dixit's allegations extend beyond the PWD to include the Setu Nigam in Rampur, where he claims a Rs 25 crore tender was awarded to Javed Khan based on fraudulent experience certificates. This pattern of alleged corruption across multiple government departments suggests a network of complicity that transcends individual institutions.

 

Dixit’s desperate plea for euthanasia permission from the President is a damning indictment of Yogi Adityanath’s policy of ‘zero tolerance” against corruption.

 

India