NASHIK, Aug 1: Police have arrested a former president of Zilla Parishad, Bidar (Karnataka) and local Janata Dal leader, Prakash Kalekar on charges of running a fake currency note racket.Nashik Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Himanshu Roy told reporters on Thursday that Kalekar had been absconding since last fortnight, after his trusted lieutenant Marcus Vaijnath Upadhyay a Janata Dal corporator in Bidar was arrested, leading to the recovery of fake currency notes of Rs 50 denomination from an unused well.Police are baffled over the use of genuine imported paper for printing notes by the accused, as the paper is directly imported by the Reserve Bank of India and distributed to security printing presses in the country.They suspect that some government officials or employees may have leaked the paper to the racketeers. The fake notes, incidentally, also carried a genuine watermark. However, the racketeers did not have a numbering machine and had to print hundreds of notes with the same serial number.This led to their arrest.The racket came to light when a petrol pump dealer on the Surat-Nashik road, at Peth, found that several currency notes of Rs 50 denomination given to him by two Bidar bound truck drivers, had identical numbers. The police intercepted the trucks and traced the origin of the notes to Marcus Upadhyay.Marcus then told them that Prakash Kalekar was their leader. But by then Kalekar had absconded with four others. They were later found at the Puttaparthi ashram of Satya Saibaba.Six persons have been arrested and Rs 1.27 crore worth of fake currency notes, all in Rs 50 denomination, have been seized along with the printing machinery. According to Roy, about Rs 38 lakh worth of fake notes were in circulation in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
