An IFS officer won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for exposing corruption and was transferred to a non-operational training academy as the official response. After nine years of accumulating travel allowances he could not use, he donated ₹3 lakh to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund and won a fresh RTI transparency order. The system is still processing this.
IFS officer Sanjiv Chaturvedi, 2002-batch Uttarakhand cadre, exposed a ₹1.6-crore eco-tourism scam in the state's forest department and received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for it — widely described as Asia's Nobel Prize, which is the level of recognition that qualifies one for a transfer to the Uttarakhand Forestry Training Academy. Placed in bureaucratic limbo for nine years through ongoing departmental proceedings that prevented normal travel, Chaturvedi accumulated ₹3 lakh in travel allowances he was entitled to but unable to spend. In April 2026, he donated the entire amount to the Uttarakhand Chief Minister's Relief Fund for conservation purposes — returning money to a state that had spent considerably more energy prosecuting him than prosecuting the eco-tourism scam. Earlier in 2026, he also won an RTI order from the Uttarakhand State Information Commission directing the High Court to disclose complaint data on district judiciary judges — a transparency ruling about the same institution currently adjudicating his own appeals. The scam he originally exposed remains under investigation. The Academy posting remains his assignment.