Times of India: Bhubaneswar: Saturday,
October 01, 2016.
A suspected
scam in distribution of scholarships worth crores came to the fore when three
undergraduate students asked the government about the deposit of Rs 20,000 each
in their bank accounts and its subsequent withdrawal. The government has asked
the Economic Offences Wing of the Crime Branch to probe the alleged
misappropriation.
The, Surya
Prasad Sahoo, Sagar Debta and Manas Singh, are Plus III students at a college
in Khurda. However, documents obtained by them using RTI Act show that they got
PG scholarships of Rs 20,000 each under the Medhabruti scheme.
They said a
middleman had taken their documents promising to get them Rs 2,000 each from a
(fictitious) governments scheme for socially and economically backward castes
for a commission of Rs 500 each.
"On
January 15 last year we got SMSes that not Rs 2,000 but Rs 20,000 each was
credited to our accounts. Within a few minutes, the entire money was
withdrawn," said Manas. "The middlemen, who had taken our documents,
offered us Rs 500 each to keep mum," he added.
The students
wrote letters to the chief minister and the chief secretary on January 28,
2015, and also lodged a complaint at Begunia police station. The finance
department in March last year wrote to the EOW for probe.
Not happy
with the slow pace of progress, Ramesh Chandra Sahoo, father of the one of the
students (Surya), filed an application under the RTI Act with the higher
education department. "I was shocked with the reply. The department said
it never credited any money to accounts of these students," he said.
Sahoo, a
small-time businessman, took up the matter with the Directorate of Treasuries
and Inspection, whose central electronic processing cell tracks electronic
transfer of cash. But the directorate could not trace cash transfer to their
accounts. In turn, it asked the Punjab National Bank branch where the students
have their accounts to find out.
The bank
explained in writing that the money had come electronically in the names of
these students but with three other non-existent account numbers. Since only
the last digits of the non-existent accounts were different from the students
actual accounts, the bank presumed that their account numbers were wrongly fed
and thus transferred it to their actual accounts.
In government
record, the money has gone to accounts, which can't be traced because of
manipulation of a digit while money has actually come. "We suspect there
is connivance of bank officials and agencies involved in distribution of the
scholarships and the scale of fraud would be much higher," Sahoo told a
press conference here on Thursday.
Since 2010,
the government has employed three private organizations, CSM Technology, TQM
Service and Odisha Knowledge Corporation, for identification of beneficiaries
and disbursal of the scholarship.
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