Jaipur, April 10 -- The Rajasthan Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) on Thursday arrested the former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Subodh Agrawal from Delhi in connection with the Rs.960 crores irregularities in the Jal Jeevan Mission scheme in the state, after nearly 50 days on the run, officials said. DG of the ACB, Govind Gupta, said, "He was arrested from a public place in New Delhi at around 11.30am on Thursday. ACB issued a lookout notice against Agrawal on February 18 a day after the agency conducted a raid across four states and arrested 10 people in the case." According to the officials, Agrawal had deliberately did not take any action despite being aware of the fact that some fake certificates were attached to bypass the tender process. "Had he taken any action timely, those tenders could have been issued to some better eligible firms. But he deliberately sat on the entire scam and provided undue benefits to some specific firms. These tenders cost around Rs.960 crores," said Gupta. He added that Agrawal had also allegedly attached an additional condition to a few more tenders to increase their prices. "Those tenders cost around Rs.50 crores. Agrawal attached an additional term of a site inspection during the application for those tenders. It revealed the identity of the applicants and increased the price unfairly. This is how he provided many undue favours to some firms, misusing his post," he said. On February 17, ACB arrested nine people while conducting a search operation at four states including Rajasthan, Delhi, Jharkhand, and Bihar. The nine officials who had been arrested are chief engineer of the PHED department, Dinesh Goyal, executive engineer of the department's Jodhpur unit Vishal Saxena, and also several other key officials - KD Gupta, Sushil Sharma, DK Gaur, Mahendra Soni, Shubhanshu Dixit, Arun Shrivastava, and Niril Kumar for issuing tenders to provide undue favour to some selected companies at a higher rate, violating the norms, causing serious loss to the government's fund for the scheme. A day after, ACB also arrested another officer from Chhattisgarh while also issuing the look out notice against Agrawal who was absconding when ACB reached at his house for the raid. "Since February 18, he kept on changing his location constantly across six states, prompting us to form a special team to search him. We also found his location twice earlier but he managed to flee. But, today, we finally held him from Delhi. He will also be produced before the court on Friday," said Gupta. The DG added that three more officials of PHED - Sanjeev Gupta, Mukesh Goyal, and Jiten Sharma - are also absconding since February 17. "We have issued a standing warrant against all these three today". Agrawal is a 1988-batch IAS officer in Rajasthan cadre who also served as the additional chief secretary (ACS) of the Public Health and Engineering Department (PHED) in 2022-23. He retired on December 31 last year as the chairman of the Rajasthan Financial Corporation days after the state government sanctioned his prosecution in the JJM case on December 17. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on November, 2023 seized around Rs.2.21 crore unaccounted cash during a series of raids at the office and residences of Agrawal. After a preliminary probe, ED registered an FIR against him on July, 2024 along with 21 other officials. On October 30, 2024, ED had also submitted an investigation report in the case. HT had reported that ED's preliminary report found thenPHED minister Mahesh Joshi and ACS Agrawal were allegedly paid at least 4% of tender amount as bribe to sanction it to private firms at a higher cost as part of a project under the mission."In the tenders, Padamchand Jain and Mahesh Mittal had paid 4% of the tender amount upfront as bribe to both ACS, and Sanjay Badhaya (for PHED minister Mahesh Joshi). Agrawal was the head of the PHED's Finance Committee which deals with all tenders worth above Rs.5 crore..." the ED report read, a copy of which was seen by HT. According to the ED, Jain and Mittal produced the fake documents in order to win 104 tenders worth Rs.979.45 crore between 2021 and 2023....