The fodder scam was unearthed in the 1990s in united Bihar. Lalu Prasad was the chief minister. Preparing a report on the financial irregularities, the Bihar auditor general had commented: “Cattle were transported on scooters, police vans, oil tankers and autos” in the fodder scam. This became the most powerful imagery of the fodder scam.
Lalu Prasad became the fodder scam’s face, though the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader was one of about 170 accused (now about 100) in 53 cases registered and investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in what was carved out as Jharkhand in 2000. Lalu Prasad was accused in five of these cases.
Lalu Prasad was accused in another fodder scam case in Bihar’s Banka. That trial is still underway. He has been convicted in all five fodder scam cases of Jharkhand.
The fodder scam became a watershed in Bihar politics, and some of the leaders made a career out of it. Somehow, the officer who first figured out a fraud in the fodder business of the Bihar government did not get due credit. He was then finance commissioner VS Dubey.
It was December 1995, when Dubey, as part of his routine job of reviewing the performance of various departments, found that the animal husbandry department topped the list in excessive withdrawals of money against allocations by the government.
Digging further, Dubey found that excessive withdrawals had been a trend for several years. For example, the government had approved Rs 10.5 crore for 1993-96 for buying 5,664 pigs, 40,500 hens, 1,577 goats and 995 sheep, but the animal husbandry department had withdrawn a whopping Rs 255.33 crore.
When he factored in over-expenses for other purposes, Dubey found total fraudulent withdrawals at Rs 409.62 crore. The scam had been unearthed.
THE SCAM
The fodder scam covered Ranchi, Chaibasa, Dumka, Gumla and Jamshedpur district treasuries in Jharkhand and Banka in Bihar. The scale of the fodder scam was estimated at Rs 950 crore (in rough value through dollar conversion, it would be about Rs 2,255 crore today).
Based on these reports of irregularities, the first raids were conducted by then Chaibasa deputy commissioner Amit Khare in January 1996. Two months later, the Patna High Court brought in the CBI to probe the scam.
AND, LALU PRASAD
The Chaibasa Treasury case was the first in which Lalu Prasad was convicted by a CBI court in September 2013 more than 11 years after the trial began. Lalu Prasad was sentenced to five years in prison in the case of fraudulent withdrawal of about Rs 37.7 crore.
