[Levin]

News posted 4 hours at the end of a separate thread. I am posting it again as I think it deserved its own thread.

Debarshi Dasgupta
India Correspondent
UPDATED 9 HOURS AGO


......


A government official in Chhattisgarh, a central Indian state, had millions of litres of water drained from a reservoir over four consecutive days amid a scorching summer just so that he could retrieve his expensive phone, sparking off a public furore over the bureaucrat’s abuse of power.

Mr Rajesh Vishwas dropped his Samsung smartphone, reportedly worth about 100,000 rupees (S$1,640), into a 4.5m-deep overflow tank attached to the Paralkot dam’s reservoir on May 21 in Chhattisgarh’s Kanker district while taking a wefie with his friends during an outing at the site.

After local divers failed to retrieve his phone, Mr Vishwas, a food inspector and a junior-level officer in the state bureaucracy, deployed two diesel pumps to drain around 2.1 million litres of water from the tank, reportedly enough to irrigate around 607ha of farmland.


https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-...bile-phone