Paddy scam worth Rs 30 crore unearthed in MP’s Jabalpur
By Anuraag Singh
A major paddy scam worth Rs 30 crore has been unearthed in Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh.
A fact-finding committee has come out with this startling revelation.
The fact-finding team, according to Jabalpur district collector Deepak Saxena, was constituted after the former minister and current BJP MLA Ajay Vishnoi, a few months ago, flagged irregularities in paddy procurement, its lifting and transportation for inter-district milling, to process the procured paddy into rice, before being made available for consumption through the public distribution system.
The fact-finding committee looked into complaints in detail regarding transportation of paddy procured from farmers in 2024-25 in Jabalpur district.
“We actually zeroed in upon the vehicle registration numbers which were shown to be trucks and had done 614 trips to lift the paddy and transport it for inter-district milling at 18 rice mills across the state. We took the help of National Highway toll booths for online records of the paddy movement, besides checking online records of GST portals as well as the state transport department real time facts and figures,” said SDM Shivangi Verma, one of the members of the probe panel, and added, ” The end results were actually shocking for all of us.”
The end results
Out of the total 614 trips (shown in the documents by the millers) that were made to transport the paddy to the mills, there were no factual records of 571 trips with the various government agencies. This means over 92% of the trips were actually never made.
Further enquiry into registration numbers of trucks shown by millers to have been used for transporting the paddy lots revealed that at least 55 of those vehicles were actually different forms of cars (including MUVs and SUVs) while 252 other vehicles were buses, tractors and pick-up vehicles. 44 vehicles were actually ghost vehicles as their registration numbers were found to be fake, while 121 vehicles actually had actually carried loads which were four times more than their bearing capacity.
As many as 86 cases have been detected where vehicles have been shown to have made trips between Jabalpur and Ujjain (to and fro distance of over 1000 kms) three to four times a day which was impossible.
“Then cases have also been detected in which the same vehicles which were shown in the documents as actually moving with paddy between Jabalpur and Ujjain and Jabalpur and Mandla districts, were actually found to be operating in parts of southern India, particularly Tamil Nadu when checked through records of GST portal and National Highway toll booths, clearly establishing a massive fraud in the transportation of the procured paddy,” Verma maintained.
According to the Jabalpur district collector, “out of the Rs 30 crore scam, there is a strong possibility of fake procurement of Rs 16 crore worth paddy having been adjusted through the transport which never happened. Also, a significant portion of the paddy shown to have been transported to 17 mills has actually been sold in the local market through middlemen. The police, after lodging 12 cases by Friday, will now find out to whom in the local market has the paddy actually been sold,” Saxena said.
As many as 12 criminal cases were lodged at 12 police stations against 74 persons, including 13 officers/employees of MP State Civil Supplies Corporation, 17 rice millers and 44 staff of cooperative societies which procured the paddy from farmers in 2024-25 on behalf of the government.
The investigations have unearthed an unholy nexus of MP State Civil Supplies Corporation staff, procurement centers/cooperative societies staff and the 17 millers, who actually got the paddy transported only on paper, while the actual paddy was routed through middlemen to the local markets.
“The millers, some officers and employees of Madhya Pradesh State Civil Supplies Corporation and some officers/employees of society/procurement centers, hatched a well-thought criminal conspiracy, tampered with government documents and prepared forged documents and committed fraudulent acts, betrayed and caused damage to the paddy procured for the public distribution system and committed a criminal act of cheating and embezzlement with the government,” an official statement by the Jabalpur district police said.
How will the loss be recovered?
According to the Jabalpur district collector Deepak Saxena, “The process is very simple. Every miller submits earnest money of Rs 11 lakh for lifting each lot of paddy procured from farmers. Besides, fixed deposits and bank guarantees of the 17 millers (prima facie found to be involved in the Rs 30 crore scam) are also there. We will recover the losses out of it.”
This article has been republished from The New Indian Express.