The cache recovered by the police from the Ahmedabad school.
A Kendriya Vidyalaya in Ahmedabad was using Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Clean India campaign as an occasion to clean out its lockers. What it found was dirt of a different sort: A cache of gold and cash - amounting to Rs 1.59 crore.
The authorities of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathans are now stumped.
While the lockers of the school at ONGC campus, Chandkheda, were allotted to teaching and non-teaching staff, no one appeared to know to whom this one belonged. And so far, no one has come forward to claim the cache.
Explaining how the discovery was made, P Dev Kumar, the Deputy Commissioner of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, said, "Some of the lockers in the teachers' room had not been used for the last two to three years. So we decided to break open the locks."
In the third locker they found Rs 1 crore in cash. The police was called in immediately. And when they opened the rest, more surprises followed.
In locker number 16, there were 21 gold bars weighting 100 gm each and cumulatively worth around Rs 59 lakh.
School principal Avdesh Prasad claimed no one had been allotted the lockers during his tenure. "I have been here for over two years," he said.
"We have questioned many staff members and teachers, but we have been so far unable to trace the person who put those bags into these lockers," news agency Press Trust of India reported local police inspector KK Desai as saying. The officer said he has informed the Income Tax department to probe the tax-related angle, PTI added.