A 'Fake ' Government Office Siphons Off 93 Projects !

 BY R.K. MISRA

India presents a kaleidoscope of emotions and  contrasts. It leaves us amused, entertained and  yet sad and sorry.

 Five  states across the country are set to  go to polls   with over 161 million casting  their vote for a result that will  set the tone for the general elections due next year. Isn’t it amusing that the best  the political creme de la creme can conjure up is a wrestling bout  between India and Bharat, shadow advantage of the Israel-Hamas conflict and the ‘lolly-popping’ that is now a routine feature.

 The Ram temple, off course remains the leitmotif of the Indian poll process for decades now. If the ruling BJP-led  government has its ‘Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra’, the Congress which is battling it has it’s ‘Adani’ to drive home the difference in choice  between a government for the rich and one for the poor. To each party its own, to political pundits the impact of the poll outcome and its implications, but  when one is done with the high flying it is the itsy-bitsy that present the mosaic of the commoners  daily grind and the environment that he exists in. It happens only in India, as they say!

 How otherwise could one account for a conman setting up a fake government office in a tribal district of Gujarat and avail of genuine government grants of Rs 4 crores over two years? By last reckoning the figure has crossed Rs 20 crores and into neighbouring districts and the last has still not been heard in the matter!

 The case came to light on October 25, not only showcasing the  audacity, impertinence and prowess of conmen but also the gullibility of the labyrinthine government network which abysmally failed to detect a ‘leeching’ in their system for such an inordinately long period of time. The main accused Sandeep Rajput, a self-styled Executive Engineer in the ‘main project division’ in Bodeli town and his partner-in-crime, Abu Bakr- Saiyed, a government contractor had set up the fake government office complete with fake government seals, forged documents and the like.

According to the FIR lodged on Thursday” it appears to be a conspiracy hatched in connivance with former and/or current employees”. Between July 26,2021  and October 25,2023 a total of Rs 4.16 crores had been ‘conned’ out as government grants for 93 projects which had been approved by the former project administrator of Chotta Udepur district.

 The ‘fraud’ was busted when the current administrator, IAS officer Sachin Kumar raised questions pertaining to 12 pending applications seeking a grant of over Rs  three crores. Official wheels moved fast thereafter and the two had been arrested by late night of October 27. It now comes out that the racket had been operating without let or hindrance for the last five years until Kumar pulled the plug on it.

While investigations will follow its due course ,the unsettling questions it raises is that an administrative juggernaut that reaches the moon, aspires for the sun and sets sights on global leadership is like a sieve when it comes to conditions on the ground. In preceding months, a person faking as an officer of the Chief Ministers Office(CMO) has been brought to heel as has been a con who faked proximity to union ministers and thereafter , the most daring of them who breached the multi-layered security in the most sensitive region of Jammu and Kashmir faking credentials of the PMO. Heartening that all con-culprits were nabbed, not so very that they managed some headway before nemesis caught up with them. More alarming is the rising audacity and the increasing frequency  and the lethargy of the system to effect an overall review of its antiquated apparatus. Piecemeal, slapstick band-aids do take place but a serious review at the administrative level  to effect an overhaul remains elusive. How else would a ‘fake’ make it as a potential trainee  in a  state-level  police sub-inspector training establishment? .

In a different context , take another case. Seventeen years after getting Indian citizenship, a Pakistan-origin man, Labhshankar Maheshwari  was arrested on October 21 in Gujarat for ‘spying’. The  Anti-Terrorist Squad(ATS) of the Gujarat Police said that he helped Pakistani agents access an Indian SIM card which they used to hack the phones of Indian defence personnel’s wards in army schools. This was in return for help to get visas for their relatives to visit India. The arrest was a sequel to information from  Indian Military Intelligence sources that an Indian SIM card was being used to target the country’s defence personnel. Maheshwari had first come to Gujarat from Pakistan in 1999 for’ fertility’ treatment of his wife.

According to official sources in Ahmedabad ,so far, 1149 Pakistani Hindus have been granted Indian citizenship by the Ahmedabad district collectorate, 108 of them last month. The Gazette notifications of 2016 and 2018 empowered the district collectors of Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Kutch in Gujarat to grant citizenship to people from the minority communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

The plight of Hindus in Pakistan has been an emotional issue in India, more so with the present establishment but there are down sides when  emotional and political spaces coalesce so caution is advised, more so when the government administrative apparatus shows itself up for what it is.

This syndicated news column was published in the respective newspapers edition dated  October 31, 2023 respectively, whose links are given below:-

https://epaper.lokmat.com/articlepage.php?articleid=LOKTIME_NPLT_20231031_6_5

https://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4693/orissapost/page/9