Kotada Village, Gujarat:
A poor shopkeeper's search on Google helped him blow the lid off the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scam in his village in Gujarat, after he found several doctors and teachers listed for his area all fictitious.
Thirty-seven-year old Aslam Khokhar is a paan shop owner in Kotada Village of Gujarat and a Class X dropout.
Few years ago, Aslam got interested in computers and became obsessed with the Google search.
Spending hours searching the web, he stumbled upon a truth.
''I was searching on Google about the NREGA scheme in my village, and to my surprise found NRIs, doctors, teachers, even government servants listed among the workers. I also found a friend's name in it. I asked him if he had a job card. It turned out he didn't even know much about NREGA,'' he says.
NREGA is the UPA Government's flagship programme that promises the rural poor at least 100 days of work on local government projects. It is a scheme meant to ensure livelihood for the desperate and the needy.
Aslam found that almost all 963 NREGA job card holders in his village were fake. The village sarpanch had entered names of well-off villagers in the NREGA list, and over the years, had collected about Rs 95 lakh as payment due to them.
"I haven't even dug a pit, but I am shown as a beneficiary," says Karsan Rama, a resident of the same village.
Worse, the village projects that supposedly employed them on were also fake.
''We have received a complaint that money has been siphoned off from a NREGA account by the sarpanch and postmaster. We are investigating into it,'' says VJ Jadeja, an Assistant Sub-Inspector in the area.