A rising incidence of fake currency notes flooding the market has set off alarm bells in the country’s investigating and intelligence network.
ISI is trying to undermine our growth: Officials
NEW DELHI/LUCKNOW: A rising incidence of fake currency notes flooding the market has set off alarm bells in the country’s investigating and intelligence network. Officials believe that Pakistan’s ISI may be trying to undermine India’s economic growth. The home ministry has issued guidelines to states to appoint nodal officers to handle these cases.
Nearly Rs3 crore in fake currency notes was found in two nationalised banks in UP on Thursday, prompting the state government to recommend a CBI probe into the incident.
The detection of counterfeit notes in the SBI’s Dumariya Ganj branch and ICICI bank in Agra was preceded by a high-level meeting of senior officials of central investigating agencies and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) a week back. “For the first time such a huge number of fake notes of Rs1,000 denomination have been recovered from a bank’s currency chest,” UP’s additional DG (Crime) Brij Lal said, adding that all the notes had the same serial number.
The Union home ministry has now issued guidelines on such cases. “Every state has been asked to appoint a nodal officer to handle fake currency note cases in coordination with the central investigating agencies,” Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta said.
The racket was revealed after the RBI conducted a surprise check at the SBI branch at the insistence of the UP Police who got wind of it when a gang of fake currency runners was busted and fake notes amounting to Rs5 lakh recovered. One suspect, Abid, revealed that he had been tasked to flood the market with Rs100 crore in fake notes. During interrogation, the suspects revealed that cashiers of some nationalised banks in UP had been bribed into joining the racket. The police also recovered Rs7.21 lakh from the SBI cashier Sudhakar Tripathi’s house, of which Rs5 lakh was in fake notes.
“Fake currency is sent from Pakistan to Nepal and then into Bihar and UP,” a senior police official told DNA. The notes, he said, were good-quality counterfeits. “These have obviously been printed in a government press, most probably in Pakistan.”
The RBI on its part has undertaken to provide machines to the banks to detect fake currency notes.
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