District food supplies officer held in Amritsar paddy scam

400 TRUCKLOADS OF PADDY WERE FOUND MISSING FROM A RICE MILL IN APRIL

AMRITSAR: Punjab vigilance bureau has arrested district food supply officer (DFSO) Raminder Singh Bath and assistant food supply officer (AFSO) Vipin Mahajan for their alleged role in a multi-crore scam, wherein paddy was embezzled from a rice mill at Jandiala Guru near Amritsar in April this year.

The officers are accused of not fulfilling their responsibility to check any kind of embezzlement or irregularity.

Whether they took a cut from those who committed the embezzlement is a subject matter of investigation.

Vigilance SSP Ravinder Kumar Bakhshi said, “The arrests were made after a thorough investigation. The officers will be produced in court on Saturday. More officers are likely to be arrested.”

The scam had come to light on April 3, after rice mill owner Veeru Mal was found missing with 400 truckloads of paddy.

As many as 12 officials of the food and civil supplies department had come under the scanner. The missing paddy was sent to Mal’s mill in the Kharif season of 2017, but on physical verification, it was not found in the stock.

Mal and his kin were booked under sections 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code at the Jandiala police station on a complaint from Gurjinder Kumar, inspector, food and civil supplies department, Amritsar.

The exact scale of the scam is not clear yet. However, sources said the scam is likely to have caused a loss of ₹100 crore to the exchequer.