Assam Social Welfare scam: V&AC sleuths arrest six officials

A top official of V&AC said that, the officials including two district officers were arrested following the investigating team found vital information of their involvement in the scam during several hour long interrogation.

The arrested officials are District officer of Goalpara Hemi Borah, District officer of Kamrup Kishori Dutta, Accounts officer RS Bhattacharya, UD assistant Debasish Dey, LD assistant Sajid Hussain and Programme officer Kulen Saikia.

The six officials are among the 11 officials, who were interrogated by the V&AC sleuths.

Earlier, the V&AC team grilled three former Congress ministers including Akon Bora, Gautam Roy and Ajanta Neog.

The vigilance team grilled at least 32 officials including three IAS officials into the scam.

Last year, the Assam CM had directed to probe the multi crore scam during the previous Congress regime.

During the investigation, it is revealed that an amount of Rs 150 crore was siphoned off every year from the social welfare department of the state for the past 15 years.

The investigation also detected nine lakh fake entries of ‘ghost children’ in the ICDS list.

The top official of V&AC said that 390 fake Anganwadi centres have been identified, which were fraudulently entered for siphoning off the money.

The V&AC sleuths had arrested an employee of Social Welfare department last year.

The investigating team had also seized several dozen file in connection with the multi crore scam.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)

Image:google maps