Greater Noida: Postmaster siphons off Rs 9L of depositors’ funds

GREATER NOIDA: A postmaster in Jewar, currently under suspension, has been booked for allegedly embezzling over Rs 9 lakh of Sukanya Samridhi Yojana (SSY) account holders’ funds.
Taking advantage of the gullibility of local farmers, Sachin Sharma, then in-charge of Ahmedpur Chiroli post office, had allegedly been making manual entries in the pass books of the account holders and not entering the same electronically for the past two years.
The alleged fraud came to fore when some of the account holders checked their books with the head post office in Khurja and found that a huge sum was missing from the same. An internal probe by the head post office also found a total of Rs. 9.51 lakh in five accounts had been bungled by Sharma.
Bhudev Sharma, one of the victims, claimed that he opened two SSY accounts in the names of her two daughters, Pransi and Nandini, and had been regularly depositing money since November 2011. In the past two years, he has deposited Rs 21,000 each in the accounts in 21 instalments.
Though the internal probe found that Sharma siphoned off money from five SSY accounts, villagers alleged that around 100 local residents were duped by him. “This is a huge scam. There are several villagers from whose funds have been bungled by the postmaster,” Lalman Pradhan, a local resident, told TOI.
An FIR under IPC Section 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant, or by banker, merchant or agent) was registered against the suspended postmaster on Thursday, following a complaint from the assistant superintendent of the Khurja head post office to DCP (Greater Noida) on August 23.
The DCP (Greater Noida) forwarded the complaint to ACP-4 (Greater Noida) Rudra Pratap Singh and asked him to submit a report within a week. “An FIR was lodged against Sharma on Thursday. More names will be added to it when the investigation proceeds further,” he said.