Rs 30,000 cr lost due to fake stamp papers, says government

The Government has estimated a loss of a whopping Rs 30,000 crore due to the rampant use of fake stamp paper in several states. A review of ...

The Government has estimated a loss of a whopping Rs 30,000 crore due to the rampant use of fake stamp paper in several states. A review of the magnitude of the scam and the need for urgent remedial measures was taken yesterday at a high-level meeting chaired by Home Secretary N. Gopalaswami.

The meeting was attended by chief secretaries and police chiefs of several states as well as the heads of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Intelligence Bureau (IB).

Interestingly, Government agencies are in agreement of how members of the underworld have taken to forging stamp paper in a big way and are pumping the proceeds for financing films and purchasing property. Says CBI chief P.C. Sharma: ‘‘Printing fake stamp paper seems to have become a lucrative activity for the underworld. Several security measures need to be adopted and the problem needs to be tackled on a war footing.’’

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The CBI chief said that following stamp paper frauds detected by Delhi Police, they were soon going to register cases against persons who had printed fake paper worth Rs 212 crore in New Delhi. Besides this, several cases have been registered by police in Maharashtra, Karnataka, AP, Bihar and UP.

After curbing the printing of fake currency notes, the Government has now listed measures to minimise sale of forged stamp paper. It has been decided that besides beefing up controls at security presses, some improvements and administrative measures need to be taken by the Central and state governments.

The IB which had done a detailed study on fake notes has now been asked to examine the nexus between the underworld and fake stamp paper sales.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More