Finance Commissioner V.S. Dubey was not moving on his own either. A week earlier, the accountant general's office in Bihar had pointed to some serious irregularities in excess withdrawals from districttreasuries in the Animal Husbandry Department throughout the state, particularly in the tribal south Bihar districts of Ranchi, East Singhbhum, West Singh-bhum, Gumla, Dumka and Jamshedpur.
When Dubey's message reached the district magistrates, the controlling authorities of the various treasuries swung into action. The district magistrate of West Singhbhum, Amit Khare, ordered a crackdown. When his officials reached the house of the local animal husbandry officer, Gauri Shankar Prasad, bundles of currency notes totalling about Rs 25 lakh were recovered from four rooms. Prasad, acting on a tip-off, had disappeared, as had the other lower-level functionaries of the department.
According to district estimates, in WestSinghbhum alone, Rs 168 crore had been withdrawn in excess of the allotted funds between 1992 and 1996. The money was allocated mainly for animal fodder, medicines and other technical requirements. When the investigators raided the sub-divisional offices of the animal husbandry department in the district, the staggering scale of excess withdrawals shook them. In 1992-93, animal husbandry officers of all levels had withdrawn Rs 38 crore, which climbed to Rs 40 crore in 1993-94, Rs 48 crore in 1994-95 and Rs 59.32 crore by the time the last audits were conducted in 1995-96.
In neighbouring Gumla district, thescrutiny of documents at the sealed animal husbandry offices revealed that Rs 20 crore had been withdrawn from district treasury offices since April 1994. The entire department, with the exception of the local treasury offi-cer, had disappeared. By this time, raids were being carried out elsewhere also. In Ranchi, a fodder supplier and his two associates were caught red-handed with Rs 35 lakh, which they were carrying in their pockets. Further investigations revealed that between October 1995 and January 1996, Rs 69.68 crore had been overdrawn from the Ranchi and Doranda treasuries alone. In Ranchi, local police offi-cials swooped on a fodder supplier, Rakesh Mehra, who was withdrawing Rs 34.80 lakh from a bank, while the rest of the suppliers made a quick getaway.
In the Lohardagga district treasury, preliminary reports uncovered that Rs 2 crore had been overdrawn and spent, while in the tribal district of Dumka, the amount varied from anything between Rs 10 and 15 crore. As the raids continued, the amounts multiplied. In one instance, Rs 16 lakh was recovered from the drawer of a minor treasury functionary. On being asked what he was doing with an amount like that, the official said he kept it for "emergency purposes".
When the orders came for attaching the property of officials directly indicted in the scam, there were more surprises. In Ranchi, it took nine truckloads of goods to clear out the house of an animal husbandry official, whose gross salary was Rs 5,000 a month. In another case, when policemen climbed up to the terrace of the house of another official, it was strewn with ornaments which had been thrown there at the last minute.
The Laloo government, which the opposition alleges is clearly involved in the scam, ordered an immediate inquiry. According to the report submitted by a high-powered committee, in the last four years alone, of the Rs 225 crore allocated to the animal husbandry's 10 regions in the state, the actual amount withdrawn was Rs 568 crore. The matter did not end there. A state government spokesman went ahead and confirmed that offices of the Animal Husbandry Department had withdrawn about Rs 644 crore in excess of bud-getary provisions totalling Rs 483 crore during a 15-year period ending 1995-96. Funding for animal husbandry, mainly in the tribal south Bihar districts, comes from the state government, Central assistance and World Bank aid. Huge state allocations have been earmarked for this sector to follow up on the cattle development programme, introduced in the state in 1947 and the intensive select breeding programme adopted in 1964. Accordingly, successive five-year-plans have laid stress on the cross-breeding of cattle with the objective to increase milk production and the number of cross-bred progenies.
The overall responsibility for the implementation of the programme is vested with the secretary of the Animal Husbandry Department, who is assisted by a director, an additional director, six joint directors and the district animal husbandry officer and his subordinates at the district level. At the subdivision and block levels, the programme is implemented by a subdivisional animal husbandry officer and block animal husbandry officer respectively. And there is no doubt about the fact that the money siphoned reached all levels.
State investigators say that not only were there large withdrawals during the last few years, the scale of forgeries is also unprecedented. At several district treasuries, amounts had been forged and figures had been tampered with. In one instance, a zero was added to the figure of Rs 10,000. In others, ones became nines with a stroke of a pen. There were, of course, no audit objections either from the accountant general's office or anyone else in the district administration.
According to well placed sources in the Bihar government, the modus operandi of the operators was simple. A voucher of Rs 50 lakh would be submitted and even before the amount was exhausted, in would come another voucher, to be cleared instantly, by a district treasury otherwise tightfisted. Some of the vouchers were ridiculous. Barely legible, they were scribbles on a piece of paper, without any letterhead or authority and the payments ran into lakhs.
Officials admit that getting their hands on the vouchers is now the biggest challenge before any serious probe. The accountant general's office has destroyed vouchers of the pre-1991 period, as is the norm to do every five years, and there can be little doubt that it will be almost impossible to get all the information necessary to get to the bottom of the scam. Already there are reports that some local officials were busy destroying files and documents relating to the scam. "This is being done with the active connivance of the state authorities, who are interested in scuttlingany serious probe," says BJP spokesman Saryu Rai, in Patna.
The government on its part maintains that they are serious about the probe. According to the state Director General of Police, S.K. Saxena, so far, 400 persons have been named in the 15 FIRs lodged in Bihar.
But clearly, defalcation from the Animal Husbandry Department is not new. There is enough factual evidence to suggest that the government was aware of illegitimate withdrawals through fake vouchers andphoney bills by the department's officials. For the first time in April 1990, the regional accountant general's office in Ranchi wrote a letter to the Regional Development Commissioner M.C. Subarno. According to the letter, between 1985 and 1988 several lakhs of rupees were paid by the regional director, animal husbandry, to contractors towards carriage costs for transportation of bulls and cows to various tribal areas underdifferent development programmes. "A test check of cases by audit revealed fraudulent payment of Rs 26.504 lakh on the basis of fake documents," the letter pointed out.
In August the same year, the then state animal husbandry minister, Ram Jivan Singh, found large-scale cases of defalca-tion in his own department and recommended a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe. In the early '90s, the vigilance department lodged an FIR against 14 persons, including the director of the animalhusbandry department, Ramraj Ram, who, interestingly, is now heading a state government probe into bunglings in his own department. Recalls R.U. Singh, former animal husbandry secretary, and currently a senior IAS officer of the state:
"I had recommended a CBI probe many years ago."
In April 1994, again, the deputy accountant general sent another letter to the Finance Secretary and the animal husbandry secretary about massive financial irregularities. Of specific note were registration numbers, purportedly of trucks, used for transporting fodder and cattle. A random check revealed that the trucks registered were actually scooters. And fake papers found show that in one region alone, 2,000 chickens polished off poultry feed worth Rs 5 crores in a year. A truck hired by the animal husbandry department to transport cattle covered 18,000 kilometres a day, in one little township.
BUTcan such dealings take place without political patronage?" questions for-mer IAS officer Abhas Chatt-erjee, who quit the service in 1992, with seven years to superannuation. He has a point. Sources say that most of the accused officers in the department had the direct patronage of successive chief ministers, their latest benefactor being Laloo Yadav. Important politicians have continuously lobbied for giving them extensions. Shyam Bihari Sinha, an official now absconding and widely regarded as a multi-billionaire and kingpin in the animal husbandry racket, was in the same post for 20 years. Another official, C.B. Dubey, remained where he was for 23 years, Gauri Shankar Prasad held the post for 22 years till he absconded on hearing of the raid, while K.M.Prasad, held the same office for 23 years.
According to BJP leader, Sushil Kumar Modi, Laloo Yadav has been pleading the case of the extension of one particular animal husbandry official, Ramraj Ram, for the last 10 years—first as legislator, then as leader of the opposition, Member of Parliament and now as chief minister. At a meeting of district magistrates in 1991, Laloo was told of one district animal husbandry officer at Chaibasa who had swindled Rs 50 lakh. Laloo ordered the immediate sacking of the officer which was carried out, but within a fortnight, the order was withdrawn and the officer sent to Ranchi in the same position. Modi points to the graph of excess withdrawals from the animal husbandry department since Laloo became chief minister in 1989 and believes that he is directly involved in the scam.
Says Harivansh, editor of the Ranchi daily Prabhat Khabar, which has been carrying on a relentless campaign against the animal husbandry mafia since 1991: "How do you account for the fact that while salaries are not being paid to teachers and several government officials and expenditure forbidden under most governmental heads of expenditure as, ostensibly, there is no money, the Laloo government issued an order in 1993, instructing the district treasuries not to withhold payments only to the animal husbandry department?" At least one of the accused officials, S.P. Rana, who had built a helipad on his terrace, is reportedly very close to the Bihar chief minister.
Laloo, however, may not be alone. As leader of the opposition in the Bihar assembly, Jagannath Mishra, who is now a central minister, had in February 1993 strongly recommended that Shyam Bihari Sinha not be removed as regional director of the animal husbandry department of Chottanagpur "keeping in view his exemplary service for tribals and Harijans in the region". Recommendations of this nature abound in the state.
There is also little hope of the money drawn in excess being ever recovered. People in the state are cynical about the outcome of any probe by state investigating agencies. But February 19 may be a red-letter day for the case that has created a furore of the kind never before seen in Bihar. On that day, the Ranchi bench of the Patna High Court will hear a petition seeking a CBI or independent probe into the fodder scam. Observers say if an outside agency is asked to probe the scam, there is some hope. But is there scope for an impartial inquiry in a state governed by one of the most powerful chief ministers in the country?
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