Sukh Ram telecom equipment scandal

Sukh Ram outside Court

Sukh Ram was a former telecom minister in Congress (Indian National Congress) government of  P V Narasimha Rao cabinet. He was also member of Parliament of Mandi constituency of Himachal Pradesh.

In 1996 the Central Bureau of Investigation seized from his official residence Rs. 3.6 crores in cash concealed in bags and suitcases, which he had collected in connection with irregularities in awarding a telecom contract. He was convicted on 18 November 2011, and sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment by a Delhi court in 2002.
Sukh Ram's conviction and his 5-year rigorous imprisonment sentence, pronounced on 19 November 2011, came at a time when the country had witnessed country-wide agitations and indefinite fast by the anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare.
As a coincidence, Sukh Ram, the former union minister of telecommunications, will be lodged in the Tihar Prisons Jail No. 1, the same as the one in which another former minister of telecommunications, A. Raja, is being lodged as an undertrial in what is widely known as the multi-core rupees 2G Spectrum scam. The November 2011 sentencing of Sukh Ram is not related to 2G Spectrum Case but is related to the fraudulent procedures followed in the purchase of polythene-insulated jelly-filled cables  for the department of telecommunication of which he was minister. Sukh Ram has earlier been sentenced for amassing assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.
Although convicted and sentenced by different courts in three different but related cases, Sukh Ram has avowed to fight his case in higher courts.