As you enter the hut, the photograph of Abba Yerawade stares at you. He died of tuberculosis on December 27, 2003, leaving behind wife Laxmi and five sons, the youngest just five and the eldest 15 years old. Ever since Abba’s death, Laxmi has struggled to make ends meet. She makes Rs 700 a month, cooking khichadi for a zilla parishad school. Today she sits in the hut, seething with anger: her dead husband’s name is one of the many used by Maharashtra government staff to commit a Rs 9.1 crore fraud in the state’s Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS), first reported by The Indian Express. According to EGS records, Abba Yerawade, more than 18 months after his death, ‘‘worked’’ under the EGS scheme in Doddi village. He not only helped ‘‘build’’ a compartmental bund between June 1 and June 7, 2005, but was ‘‘paid’’ Rs 426 as wages. The records say he also ‘‘worked’’ between June 8 and June 15, 2005 and ‘‘received’’ Rs 477.75. This is in the FIR lodged by South Solapur taluka tehsildar, Dhanaji Toraskar. He’s one of the officers investigating the EGS fraud that has rocked the state and set off alarm bells in faraway Delhi which plans to borrow the Maharashtra model for the Employment Guarantee Act. In June, Solapur Collector Manisha Varma ordered an inquiry after she suspected foul play: the number of people shown as working under EGS—and the wages paid—appeared to be very high. After some digging, it was found that Varma and the deputy collector’s signatures had been forged by staff of the agriculture department to sanction work orders. The irony is not lost on Tukaram Yerawade’s family. Forty-year-old Tukaram died on March 28 last year, leaving behind, among others, a mentally challenged son. His name also found its way into the EGS muster, saying he had worked between June 8 and 15, 2005 and received a payment of Rs 477.75. Says Tukaram’s mother Tarabai: ‘‘They are using my dead son’s name. Shouldn’t we have got that money? Aren’t they ashamed?’’ She doesn’t even have a photograph of her son: ‘‘Who knew he would die so young?’’ Following Varma’s order, Toraskar paid a surprise visit to Doddi on July 25, after preliminary investigations showed that signatures had been forged. ‘‘I kept the focus on Boramani Circle and its 17 villages because it has maximum EGS schemes.’’ Under Boramani Circle, all 129 work orders since October 1, 2004 have been found to be bogus. Toraskar chose Doddi because it had just completed two compartmental bund jobs in June. Each bund is about 11 km long. When Toraskar and two other revenue officers reached the village at 9.30 am for jansunwai (public hearing), people were taken by surprise. As names from the muster were read out, it transpired that two persons were already dead and another 11 did not live in the village anymore (daughters married off or sons who have migrated elsewhere). There were also 51 others who had never worked under the EGS but had all been shown as ‘‘paid’’ a sum totalling Rs 30,000. Says Varma: ‘‘Boramani Circle had the largest number of administrative approvals and we decided to focus on one or two villages. We quickly went in for muster verification. When we found that even the dead had been registered as labourers, this was irrefutable evidence.’’ For the villagers, the ordeal is still not over. Take the case of Laxmibai. Apparently, someone got wind of the jansunwai and paid her Rs 500. ‘‘I don’t know their names but they came early in the morning and paid me Rs 500. I was wondering why. They returned in the evening and asked me whether I had given a statement to Toraskar. When I said ‘yes’, they took back the money they had given me.’’
