FIR against bank employees in PM crop insurance scam

Jaipur: A day after the state agriculture minister Kirori Lal Meena unearthed a racket in which 71 individuals were allegedly shown as farmers using forged land records and fake crop details to secure crop insurance benefits under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) at the Salasar branch of State Bank of India (SBI), the agriculture department Saturday filed an FIR at Salasar police station in this connection.TOI got the copy of the FIR in which a case of cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy was lodged by assistant director agriculture (extension) Govind Singh Rathore of the agriculture department after preliminary findings pointed to large-scale irregularities in crop insurance policies.
The FIR names Salasar branch manager Umesh Kumar Saraswat and bank employee Bhagirath Nayak, accusing them of issuing fake crop insurance policies in collusion with representatives of Agriculture Insurance Company of India Limited. The complaint alleged that the accused conspired to insure non-existent agricultural land parcels to fraudulently claim insurance payouts. The agriculture minister Friday said that insurance policies were issued in the names of 71 farmers from Bajju Tejpura Patwar Mandal and village Bajju Khalsa in Gajner tehsil of Bikaner district. However, verification by revenue authorities revealed that the survey numbers, khasra details and land records mentioned in the policies did not exist in official records.Despite the discrepancies, premiums worth approximately Rs 13.51 lakh were deposited in the names of the purported farmers. Additionally, about Rs 15.76 lakh was shown as the contribution of the state and central govts. The total projected claim amount in the alleged fraud was estimated to be nearly Rs 9 crore. The case was registered under relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and authorities initiated a detailed probe into the financial transactions and the attempted fraudulent claims.