Anticipatory bail plea of IAS official Raju rejected

PATNA: The special vigilance court-I of judge Madhukar Kumar on Friday rejected the anticipatory bail petition of senior IAS official SM Raju in multi-crore scheduled caste and scheduled tribe scholarships scam.
Raju, a 1991 batch Bihar cadre officer, was posted as principal secretary in the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe welfare department when the scam surfaced in year 2013-2014.Raju, along with the then special secretary Suresh Paswan, assistant director (computer) Indrajeet Mukherjee, sub-divisional welfare officer Vidhan Chandra Rai and block welfare officer Sanjay Kumar are among the other government officials who are accused in the FIR lodged by the vigilance investigation bureau on November 29 last year for the embezzlement of scholarship funds.
Visakhapatnam’s Gonna Institute of Information and Technology secretary JB Naidu, its director, managing committee members and Guntur Engineering College’s principal B Bramhaiya, its admission coordinator G Prasad Rao and six touts running a consultancy in Patna are also accused in the FIR.
Special vigilance public prosecutor Vijay Kumar Sinha and Anandi Singh said the court also rejected the anticipatory bail petitions of Paswan, Rai and Kumar.
“Raju, as principal secretary, had brought out a notification that disbursement of scholarships for technical education of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students will be controlled by the department headquarters while scholarships for rest will be disbursed at district level as earlier,” they said, adding the scholarship funds were directly transferred into the bank accounts of technical colleges, instead of disbursing to the students.
They also said scholarship funds were transferred even when the colleges did not provide examination marks and other progress details of the students to the department.
“During investigation, several students recorded their statements before the vigilance investigation team that the touts forcibly took them from villages for admission to the respective colleges from where they returned within a month or two,” the prosecutors said, adding the scholarship funds in the name of these students continued to be disbursed to colleges.
“Altogether Rs4.82 crore was disbursed in 2013-2014 to 32 technical colleges. Investigation till now has exposed discrepancies in scholarship funds made to the two colleges at Visakhapatnam and Guntur,” they said, adding investigation is still going on in the scam.
They also said the 32 technical colleges across India, including a few in Bihar, were identified in the investigation.