india

Updated: Jul 13, 2019 12:48 IST

The special operations group (SOG) of Rajasthan police has started an investigation into an alleged loan scam across co-operative banks in various districts of the state six months after it surfaced, the state’s police chief said.

The alleged scam first unraveled in January in Dungarpur district after many farmers who did not take loans found their names in the list of beneficiaries whose loans were waived off.

Farmers from several villages in Churu, Hanumangarh, Bharatpur and Dholpur districts also approached the co-operative department authorities with complaints about their names appearing on the list of beneficiaries of loan waivers even though they never took loans.

There is no clarity on the total amount of money involved in the alleged scam but a co-operative department official said that in Dungarpur alone the amount involved was about Rs eight crore.

The Rajasthan government’s co-operative department which carried out an initial probe, recently asked the police to investigate the case.

“The special operations group has started investigating the matter after we received a letter from the government few days back. The SOG will submit a report soon,” Rajasthan’s director general of police (DGP) Bhupendra Singh said .

An official of the SOG said that more than one lakh accounts are under the scanner of the agency in which waived loan amount was transferred although they never took a loan.

“We are obtaining district wise data of number of accounts in which waived loan amount was transferred. Many farmers who had not taken any loan had approached the co-operative department complaining that their names were in the list of beneficiaries of farmers whose loans were waived,” the official said.

Along with irregularities in loan waiver, the SOG is also investigating cases of cheating registered against 125 co-operative societies in the state.

When the economic offences wing of the SOG obtained data across all police stations of they found that 385 cases are registered against 125 credit co-operative societies of state.

The three districts where maximum number of cases registered against these society were Sirohi (213), Pali (138) and Jalore (12).