BRS Government Officials Pulled Wool Over Sheep Scheme Corruption

Amidst persistent allegations of misappropriation of hundreds of crores of rupees, if not around a thousand crore, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s recently released report made it very clear as to how, at every stage and step of the scheme, money was siphoned off turning this scheme into a conduit of unbridled corruption during the former BRS led government.

Such was the blatant abuse of power that the CAG revealed in its report some unbelievable demonstration of transportation skills –three to ten sheep units (i.e., 63 to 210 sheep) were shown to have been carried in each trip on two-wheelers.

The CAG found that not only were many sheep transportation invoices submitted to the government fake, in the case of 336 invoices, the vehicles that transported the sheep units were found to be two-wheelers (53), autorickshaws (219), passenger cars and vans (35), buses (27) and even ambulances (two).

Even more bizarre was the finding that 10 such invoices raised involved sheep transportation on fire trucks (6), water tankers (3), and also a mobile compressor vehicle.

“These could not have been used for transportation of sheep,” the CAG report said.

The CAG also found that there were serious irregularities in terms of purchase of sheep feed, a large number of fake and non-existent beneficiaries, and issuing duplicate identity tags to inflate the number of sheep that were distributed. The CAG report makes it clear that the sheep scheme of the BRS government was steeped in corruption, with lame excuses given by the then BRS government to questions raised by the CAG.

Counting sheep

Of 80.55 lakh ear tags with unique 12-digit number for each animal, data of 17,912 sheep contained less/more than 12 digits.

Of the remaining 80.37 lakh tags, 2,17,643 tags were used two to 34 times, resulting in a total loss of 4,55,300 original and duplicate tags.

CAG said this shows 2,37,657 sheep (4,55,300 minus 2,17,643) shown as supplied, were fake

Subsidy of Rs 92.69 crore claimed to have been spent were fraudulent transactions.

Other frauds found by CAG:

Non-maintenance of beneficiary-wise files

Non-availability of transportation invoices

Payments made on invoices on improper/manipulated/fake registration numbers

Invoices showing transportation of higher number of sheep units than possible/permitted; Recycling of sheep

Non-supply of feed to the supplied sheep due to non-availability of sheep on ground

Benefits given to dead persons