PATNA: Senior IAS official SM Raju was on Thursday placed under suspension by the Bihar government for his alleged involvement in the state’s SC-ST scholarship scam.
The name of the 1991-batch IAS official had cropped up in the multi-crore-rupee scam last year and a probe by the state Vigilance Investigation Bureau had found massive irregularities in disbursement of scholarships to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students enrolled in technical education institutes outside Bihar.
Raju was the secretary of the state welfare department in 2013-14, during which the bulk of the alleged irregularities in distribution of scholarship shave took place, said sources. Armed with enough evidence against several officials in the scam, the Vigilance Investigation Bureau had lodged FIRs against Raju and 15 other officials on December 21 last.
“An order has been issued from the chief minister’s office for the suspension of SM Raju, who is currently posted as a member of the State Revenue Board,” said a senior official familiar with the development. The government is also likely to place other officials named in the FIR under suspension,” he added.
The SC-ST scholarship scam has earned the Nitish Kumar-led coalition government much ignominy after the Opposition BJP raised the issue strongly in the state legislature last year. Senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi had alleged that large sums of scholarship money were paid to fictitious institutions and that bureaucrats made a fast buck in the name of providing technical education to students from SC and ST communities.
As per the scholarship scheme, one of Nitish Kumar’s pet projects, amounts ranging between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh for each student per year are transferred by the state government to educational institutions across the country where SC and ST students from Bihar are admitted. The funds cover the course fees and other allied expenses of the students.
The scam surfaced last year when 60 SC-ST students at Rajdhani Engineering College in Bhubaneswar had complained of non-payment of scholarship money.