3 min readJaipurUpdated: May 7, 2026 10:35 AM IST
Rajasthan’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) arrested former Congress minister Mahesh Joshi in the early hours of Thursday in connection with the alleged Jal Jeevan mission scam, over a month after it arrested former IAS officer Subodh Agarwal in the case.
In April last year, too, Joshi was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the case, spending about seven months in jail before he was granted bail by the Supreme Court in December.
Joshi was picked up around 5:30 am from his residence in Jaipur. While he was the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) minister, Agarwal was the Additional Chief Secretary and held the charge of PHED in the previous Congress government.
As per the ACB, a firm owner had allegedly submitted fake completion certificates along with a letter of award issued by Indian Railway Construction International Limited (IRCON) along with bid documents to get contracts under Jal Jeevan Mission in connivance with the senior officials of the Public Health Engineering Department.
When the Additional Chief Engineer of PHED sought to verify the certificates issued to the firm, IRCON Bengaluru office had declared them forged. It was subsequently revealed that alleged corruption worth crores was done by getting tenders of about Rs 960 crores through these fake completion certificates.
Apart from Agarwal and Joshi, ACB had previously arrested ten others in the case, who are government engineers and officers, including Dinesh Goyal, K D Gupta, Subhanshu Dixit, Sushil Sharma, Niril Kumar, Vishal Saxena, Arun Srivastava, D K Gaud, Mahendra Prakash Soni, and Mukesh Pathak, a private person.
Additionally, standing warrants for the arrest of three other accused, who are allegedly absconding, were also issued by a court. These are government officials Mukesh Goyal, Jitendra Sharma, and Sanjeev Gupta, a private person.
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The ED had first conducted searches at various locations in Jaipur, Alwar, Neemrana, Behror and Shahpura under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in September 2023 while investigating the case. So far, it has searched over 70 locations and seized cash and goods valued at over Rs 11 crore.
Months before the ED’s 2023 searches, BJP leader Kirodi Lal Meena, then the party’s Rajya Sabha MP, had claimed that the scam in PHED was worth Rs 20,000 crore, and claimed that Joshi, ACS Subodh Agarwal and others were involved in it.
In May 2024, the CBI too had registered an FIR in connection with the scam, almost eight months after the conclusion of its preliminary enquiry registered on August 24, 2023.
