Overview
- More than a dozen hard disks holding tender, procurement, coal-contract and staff records went missing from the TNPDCL headquarters in mid-May.
- State police and the utility’s vigilance unit have opened coordinated probes and have secured or questioned several people while pursuing further arrests across Chennai and Bengaluru.
- A temporary contract IT employee has been arrested and investigators are analysing call logs, CCTV and access records to test for insider involvement and a wider network.
- Officials say backup copies exist and teams are restoring and validating five years of tender, coal and contract-employee data to recover lost information and preserve evidence.
- The case has intensified scrutiny of past procurement, with related transformer-contract material already shared with the CBI and critics pointing to surveillance failures and discrepancies in the number of disks reported missing.