Rajesh Vishwas, a food inspector, was suspended after he drained an essential reservoir to find his smartphone.
On May 21, reports the New York Times, while posing for a selfie during a picnic with friends at Paralkot reservoir in Chhattisgarh State, where he lives, the food inspector dropped his $1,200 Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra into the water.
So Mr. Vishwas had a big decision to make – should he just go and buy a replacement phone – or drain the reservoir?
Apparently, he decided that he had to have it back and claimed that it had official departmental data stored on it, according to NDTV, the Indian television station.
According to the BBC, after local divers were called in to retrieve the phone – and failed after two days of searching – Vishwas paid for a diesel pump to be brought in. It took three days to pump millions of liters of water out of the dam.
In the three days of pumping the water out of the dam, two million liters (440,000 gallons) of water dropped the water level by three feet, and by some estimates, enough water was released to irrigate 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of farmland.
Business Insider is reporting that while the Samsung phone was eventually retrieved, it was too waterlogged to work in the end. The official has since been suspended from his position after he was criticized for exploiting his position and wasting water.
To cover his deed, Mr. Vishwas later claimed he had received “oral permission” from R.C. Dhivar, an official at the local Water Resources Department, to drain three or four feet of water.
Mr. Vishwas even told NDTV that Mr. Dhivar said that doing so, “it would in fact benefit the farmers.” However, whatever the arrangement was, it backfired.
“He has been suspended until an inquiry. Water is an essential resource and it cannot be wasted like this,” Priyanka Shukla, a Kanker district official, told The National newspaper.
Vishwas denied “misusing” his position, saying the drained water was from an overflow section of the dam and was not “in usable condition.”
But the BBC reports that his actions have drawn criticism from politicians, with the state’s opposition BJP party’s national vice-president tweeting: “When people are depending upon tankers for water facility in scorching summers, the officer has drained 41 lakh liters which could have been used for irrigation purpose for 1,500 acres of land.”
