Of the recently booked 42 accused in the multi-crore Hoshiarpur land scam, around a dozen women accused and also the relatives of the main accused the then sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) Anand Sagar Sharma were also booked by the vigilance bureau (VB). The Punjab VB had last week booked 42 people and arrested eight of them for usurping Rs 64 crore in Jalandhar-Chintpurni highway compensation scam. It is learnt some more accused will be added to this list and so far the total number of accused has reached 64. The scam dates back to 2015-16 when land was to be acquired for the Jalandhar-Chintpurni four-lane project. There are some accused who are not directly involved in the sale and purchase of the land but money might have transferred in their accounts by those who were involved in the same purchase of land. The newly added 42 accused include Harjinder Kaur, Sukhwinder Kaur, Varinderjeet Kaur, Gurbax Kaur, Anju, Agarwal, Baljeet Kaur, Satpal, Kaur, Gurinderjeet Kaur, Hardeep Kaur, Poonam, Gill, Charanjit Kaur, Daljeet Kore among others. Most of these accused are related to each other or the members of one family only. The sources in the vigilance bureau said that when one person of a family was involved in the sale purchase of the land during this scam, they have either transferred money in the account of their other family members, or involved them for one or other transactions of money. Some of the accused are the big businessmen of the area as well as colonisers, VB sources said. Sources added that investigation is still on and several other names can be included in the list. Last week, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the vigilance bureau, during its investigation, found that the record was missing from the office of the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) and tehsildar of Hoshiarpur. A Hoshiarpur based RTI activists Rajiv Vashisht was the whistleblower in this land scam which happened in 2015-16 and he had highlighted the entire case that how the land was purchased by flouting all the norms of land acquisition and how the land mafia was benefitted hugely. Vasishta told The Indian Express that during the VB investigation the names of many more will come in the coming days. Earlier VB had 13 accused, including then SDM Anand Sagar, Hoshiarpur tehsildar Baljinder Singh, Hoshiarpur naib tehsildar Manjit Singh, patwari of Khawaspur village (Piplanwala) Daljit Singh, patwari of Khawaspur village Parvinder Kumar, Registry Clerk Sukhwinderjit Singh Sodhi, among others were arrested who joined investigation and most of them are on bail now. During investigation, it was found that then SDM changed the highway alignment in five villages Khawaspur, Digana Kalan, Digana Khurd, Hardo Khanpur and Khasra of Bassi Jana/Chohli in schedule 3-A prepared by him which did not correspond to the origin draft ‘A' prepared by Louis Berger Company after a survey.
