Former Rajasthan minister Mahesh Joshi arrested by ACB in Rs 900-crore Jal Jeevan Mission scam
PHED minister at the time, he allegedly took bribes for awarding tenders; ED had jailed him in 2025.
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ACB
Jaipur: The Anti-Corruption Bureau on Thursday arrested former Rajasthan minister Mahesh Joshi from his Sain Colony residence here in connection with the alleged Rs 900-crore Jal Jeevan Mission scam, marking the senior Congress leader’s second arrest in the same case in just over a year.
An ACB Special Investigation Team carried out the arrest. Joshi, who held the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) portfolio in the previous Congress government, is accused of misusing his position to award tenders worth crores in exchange for bribes.
This is Joshi’s second stint in custody over the JJM case. The Enforcement Directorate had arrested him in April 2025, after which he spent seven months in jail before the Supreme Court granted him bail on December 3, 2025. Following his earlier arrest, Joshi had publicly denied any wrongdoing, saying, “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t taken any money.”
The ACB had registered an FIR towards the end of 2024 against 22 officials, including Joshi. Among those named are JJM financial advisor Sunil Sharma, then chief engineers Ram Karan Meena and Dinesh Goyal, additional chief engineers Arun Srivastava, Ramesh Chand Meena and Paritosh Gupta, superintendent engineers Niril Kumar, Vikas Gupta, Mahendra Prakash Soni, Bhagwan Sahay Jaju and Jitendra Sharma, and executive engineer Vishal Saxena. The agency says a forensic trail of email IDs led investigators to identify the network, which is alleged to have awarded tenders on the strength of fake experience certificates.
The probe, which began in 2024, has so far seen 10 arrests, with three accused still absconding. On April 9, the ACB took former Additional Chief Secretary (Water Resources) Subodh Agrawal into custody and questioned him about Joshi’s role during his tenure as PHED minister.
The case centres on tenders awarded under the Centre’s Jal Jeevan Mission, the flagship scheme to deliver piped water to every household. In 2021, contractors Padamchand Jain and Mahesh Mittal of Shri Shyam Tubewell Company and M/s Shri Ganpati Tubewell Company allegedly secured four PHED tenders worth crores by submitting fake experience certificates. Shri Ganpati Tubewell Company is alleged to have bid in 68 PHED tenders and won 31 as L-1, worth Rs 859.2 crore, while Shri Shyam Tubewell Company is said to have participated in 169 tenders and emerged L-1 in 73, worth Rs 120.25 crore.
After the alleged scam surfaced, the ACB began arresting officials, while the ED registered a separate case and raided premises linked to Joshi and his associate Sanjay Badaya. The CBI registered its own case on May 3, 2024, and the ED handed over evidence and documents to the ACB on May 4. Piyush Jain, Padam Chand Jain, Mahesh Mittal and Sanjay Badaya have already been arrested in the case.
