Rajeev Kumar (police officer, born 1966)

Rajeev Kumar PPM IPS (born 30 July 1966) is an Indian police officer and bureaucrat, who is serving as the Director General of West Bengal Police, since July 2024. Previously he served in the same post from December 2023 until was removed by Election Commission of India on March 2024. Prior to his office, he is also additional chief secretary of Information Technology of West Bengal Government since 2023.

Birth and education
Kumar was born in 1966 in Uttar Pradesh. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Roorkee (now IIT-Roorkee).

Early police career
Kumar joined the Indian police service in 1989 from the Uttar Pradesh cadre. He also served as the Bidhannagar Police Commissioner and the Director of Special Task Force (STF), Kolkata Police.

Kolkata Police (2016–2019)
He was briefly appointed as the Kolkata Police Commissioner from 14 Feb 2016 to 12 April 2016. In the 2016 elections in West Bengal, he was removed from the post by the Election Commission of India. He was later reinstated on 21 May 2016 and served until 19 February 2019.

Later career
He was the Additional Director of Criminal Investigation Department, West Bengal from 20 February 2019 until December 2019. He was then promoted to Principal Secretary of the Department of Information Technology, West Bengal until 2023.

He was promoted to Director General of Police, West Bengal on 27 December 2023 on the superannuation of Manoj Malaviya (RR:1988).

Controversies
In 2019, Kumar was accused by the CBI in the supreme court of tampering with electronic evidence related to the Saradha chit-fund case. An estimated 1.8 million depositors from West Bengal, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha contributed an estimated Rs. 2,460 crore to the case. It was discovered in 2012 when depositors began reporting suspicious activity to the police.