An employee at the Masaurhi Circle Office in Patna district was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly generating a residence certificate in the name of “Dog Babu” using official government systems and then circulating an image of it that went viral.
The accused, identified as Mintu Kumar Nirala, worked as an executive assistant responsible for issuing certificates under the RTPS (Right to Public Services) portal.
The arrest followed a detailed on-site investigation conducted earlier on Tuesday by the Patna District Magistrate and the City Superintendent of Police (East) at the Masaurhi Block-cum-Circle Office. Other senior administrative officials were also part of the inquiry.
This came after a residence certificate in the name of a dog, “Dog Babu”, which also featured a photograph of a dog, went viral on social media. As per the preliminary investigation, a report was submitted on Monday, which found that the application was intentionally filed with forged documents and without mobile or email identification. “It was uploaded to the RTPS system on July 15 at 9.41 am,” authorities said.
During the investigation, officials found technical logs that allegedly confirmed “Nirala himself uploaded the application from his designated system and was the first to later access the approved certificate”. He was found to have allegedly misused documents, such as Aadhaar and voter IDs belonging to unrelated individuals, sources said.
Sources also said the application passed through the regular approval workflow due to batch processing by an IT assistant, who failed to manually verify the documents. Further, the digital signature of the Revenue Officer was used to authenticate the certificate without proper oversight.
Officials had said on Monday that while the IT assistant had been immediately dismissed from service, a recommendation had been made to the concerned department to suspend the Revenue Officer over procedural lapses.
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Authorities are further investigating the case to ascertain the motive behind the act and whether others were involved.
According to sources, the accused had been deputed to the Sub-Divisional Office for the process of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll, but he allegedly frequently went to the Circle Office ahead of office hours to process caste and residence certificates from his computer terminal.
