For over a decade, all arms of the state hounded whistleblower and Indian Forest Services officer, Sanjeev Chaturvedi, as he unearthed scams and corruptions wherever he was posted. On Wednesday, Chaturvedi was named for the 2015 Ramon Magsaysay award, Asia’s highest honour, for his work as a public servant and his relentless drive against corrupt practices in state mechanisms.

Currently the deputy secretary of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), he has been awarded for ‘Emergent Leadership’, one of the categories of the award.

Previously, he was the central vigilance officer of AIIMS, a post from which he was suddenly removed by the then Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, after he exposed illegalities on campus which involved senior officials and politicians.

This has been a pattern in his career, with seven cases slapped against him at various points of time, from when he was exposing scams as an officer in Haryana, earning the wrath of the Hooda government, to his stint in AIIMS, where he ruffled the NDA's feathers.

His constant battle with politicians and governments has led only to deep disillusionment with the people running the system. “I’m very disappointed in the PMO,” Chaturvedi told the press on Wednesday. “I got to know through RTI that in August 2014, the PM sought a meeting with the then health minister about my removal as CVO.”

Chaturvedi learnt that the health ministry submitted a report that, according to him, levelled false and salacious charges against him – accusing him of bad practice, lacking qualification. “This was completely contradictory to their own health secretary Luv Verma’s report from May 2014 which called my conduct outstanding.”

Chaturvedi said that he submitted his own documents to the PMO and asked for a “fair probe” but “my harassment accentuated”. “Ever since I made the submission, my promotion, my transfer requests, all have been held up for six months at a time,” he said. “However, my removal was signed in just 24 hours.”

Additionally, he said, the health ministry took out a press release on 20 August 2014 that spoke of “pending complaints” in AIIMS, which contradicted AIIMS own written report that clarified there were no cases or complaints against him. “What kind of a ministry fabricates reports against its own officers? This shows that the government’s policy isn’t zero tolerance towards corruption, but towards honesty,” said Chaturvedi.

Haryana was no different. When Chaturvedi exposed illegal grabbing of forest land in the Saraswati Wildlife Sanctuary and illegalities in plantation projects in Jhajjar and Hisar, he found himself facing suspension, a departmental charge sheet, a dowry case that his in-laws were reportedly incited to file, an abetment to suicide case where an officer he had suspended took his own life, reportedly for unrelated reasons.

In the recent months he has tried to get his cadre changed from Haryana to Uttarakhand due to constant harassment, which, post AIIMS, the central government has delayed repeatedly despite him following the due process.

So far, four presidential orders have been issued to squash various charges against him, the Central Administrative Tribunal has taken the PMO to task for needlessly putting obstacles in his cadre deputation process and, in 2010 a CBI probe had found that he was indeed facing harassment from the Haryana government.

“There are enough safeguards in our constitution for an honest officer to keep fighting. We cannot be just thrown out of service,” said Chaturvedi. However, he added, “unfortunately, there is a big gap now between the Constitution and the people running the administration”.