Dissatisfied with the Haryana state government response, now the Punjab and Haryana High court has strongly condemned the role of officers in Haryana state government as regard release of pension amount worth crores of rupees to the retired employees who have already died years ago. The court put the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on notice on a plea seeking probe by the agency on the allegations of large scale pension embezzlements in Haryana state in which pensions were disbursed in the name of dead persons by state government officials in connivance with local bodies’ elected representatives all over in the state.
The High court bench of Justice RN Raina acting on the plea filed by an RTI activist a Kurukshetra resident Rakesh Bains through his advocate Pradeep Rapria, stating that despite several representations the state government officials neither taking any action against officials nor registering FIRs to investigate the scam. Information reveals that nearly 14000 such cases have been detected in Kurukshetra district alone. The complaint had reached court in January 2017, following which High Court sought reports from the state government when thorough probe revealed that 13,477 beneficiaries were such who were ineligible, many of them already died and their pension was not stopped. According to information by a government officer, two lower rank employees were arrested and another two employees were charge sheeted by the government which made recoveries of Rs 13 lakh, however, FIRs were not registered in all the cases of fraud.
The court was not satisfied with the reply seeking clarification why FIR was registered only in the case of Kurukshetra incident and what about large number of fraud cases in other part across the state, saying that the course of action adopted by the state government is not satisfactory and needs thorough investigation by CBI. However, social justice department joint director told court that recoveries are being made wherever illegal pension had been disbursed. However, no decision as regard FIRs has been taken by the CAG.High Court also ordered to submit the names of elected municipal members and village Sarpanches who had recommended the the casesof those already dead.
