Atul Sharma
Early Times Report
Jammu, Sept 18: While the poorest of Jammu & Kashmir queued up for their quota of subsidised grain, a JKAS officer was allegedly building an empire of shopping complexes, land banks, and fixed deposits — funded, investigators say, by siphoning off the very food grains meant for the state’s most vulnerable.
The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has now registered two separate FIRs against Sheeba Inayat, laying bare what appears to be a years-long scheme of diverting Public Distribution System (PDS) grain and quietly converting it into personal fortune.
Inayat, who served as Assistant Director, Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution (CA&PD), Baramulla — now redesignated Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs (FCS&CA) — stands accused of manipulating the very system designed to feed the poor, the needy, and the marginalised, allegedly turning a welfare mechanism into a personal cash machine between 2013 and 2015.
According to the ACB, the alleged fraud was disturbingly systematic. Investigators found that government food grains were unauthorisedly shifted between categories — pulled from the Above Poverty Line (APL) quota and re-appropriated into Below Poverty Line (BPL) and Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) allocations, the very schemes meant to protect India’s poorest households. This manipulation alone carried a financial implication of over Rs 26 lakh.
But the deeper rot lay elsewhere: a staggering 16,763.77 quintals of government food grain — worth nearly Rs 1.68 crore — simply could not be accounted for. Officials also flagged glaring mismatches between district-level consolidated statements and circle-wise distribution records, the kind of paper trail discrepancies that often mask deliberate diversion.
Perhaps most damning is the pattern investigators uncovered around the 2014 Jammu & Kashmir floods — a moment of genuine crisis that, the ACB alleges, was exploited rather than honoured. Ration cards and registered households reportedly spiked abnormally during the flood period, only to fall sharply once the crisis passed. To investigators, this is no coincidence — it points to manipulated beneficiary records and grain quietly funnelled away under the cover of disaster relief, even as flood victims elsewhere were reportedly left struggling for basic supplies.
Together, the alleged irregularities are said to have caused a wrongful loss of Rs 2.61 crore to the government exchequer — and a corresponding wrongful gain to Inayat, her alleged accomplice Mohammad Shafi Rather alias Kandaman, then a salesman in the department, and other unidentified public servants and private persons.
The findings have now translated into formal action. FIR No. 04/2026 has been registered at Police Station ACB Baramulla under Sections 5(1)(c), 5(1)(d) and 5(2) of the J&K Prevention of Corruption Act, along with Sections 409 and 120-B of the RPC, naming Inayat, Rather, and other unidentified public servants in what the ACB describes as a criminal conspiracy to defraud the public distribution system.
Search warrants issued by the Anti-Corruption Court, Baramulla, led to raids on the residential and office premises of both Inayat and Rather, with the ACB confirming that incriminating material was seized during the operation.
If the grain diversion case exposes the alleged crime, a second FIR exposes its fruits. The ACB has separately booked Inayat for amassing assets grossly disproportionate to her known sources of income — a portfolio that investigators say reads more like that of a business tycoon than a mid-level government officer.
Named among her alleged holdings: a five-storey commercial shopping complex in Baramulla, multiple plots of land spread across Baramulla, Gulmarg, Kreeri, and Chowadi in Jammu, along with substantial bank balances, fixed deposit receipts, LIC policies, and jewellery. The ACB alleges that this wealth — and the lifestyle it funded — simply cannot be explained by her official salary, pointing instead to sustained enrichment through corrupt and illegal means while she held public office, including a stint as Block Development Officer, Singhpora/Pattan.
This second case has been registered as FIR No. 03/2026 at Police Station ACB Baramulla under Section 5(1)(e) read with Section 5(2) of the J&K Prevention of Corruption Act. Searches conducted at her residential and office premises, once again under court-issued warrants, yielded further incriminating evidence, the ACB said.
With both cases now formally registered and evidence already seized from multiple locations, the ACB has signalled that this is only the beginning of a wider probe — one that will likely examine how deep the alleged conspiracy ran, who else may have benefited, and how a scheme built to feed J&K’s poorest was allegedly hollowed out for personal gain over years, largely undetected. |
