Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
By Dheeraj Fartode
FLYING Squad of Election Commission, monitoring the implementation of Model Code of Conduct and expenditure for Legislative Assembly elections, intercepted a Maruti Swift car near Mahal (in Kotwali Police Station area) and seized Rs 70 lakh unaccounted cash from it, besides detaining two persons for interrogation in this connection on Thursday.
Acting on a tip off, the Flying Squad blocked the car near Jagnade Square in the afternoon. During the search, the squad members found a bag containing cash in the utility box of the car. Flying Squad members took the cash along with the Maruti Swift car (MH-31/CR-908) and its driver to Kotwali Police Station. The seizure of cash created quite a sensation in political circles.
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| The officials with the seized cash of Rs 70 lakh. |
After the driver, Dilip Watuji Kodane (45), a resident of Kharbi Chowk, told the Flying Squad members that the car belonged to Pushpa Rajendra Agrawal, they called her to the police station. During inquiry, she told the Flying Squad that a businessman had sent the cash to her house as it was to be delivered to her Rajnandgaon-based son-in-law. She stated that her son-in-law told her to send the cash to his sister’s house in Wathoda. Accordingly, she asked her driver Dilip to take the bag containing cash to Wathoda and hand it over to the sister of her son-in-law.
Gulzar Wani, Expenditure Observer (East, Central, North Nagpur), confirmed to ‘The Hitavada’ the seizure of Rs 70 lakh cash. “Prima facie, it is unaccounted money as the people involved are unable to explain the exact source. We are still investigating the matter,” he added. Wani said that the election machinery would hand over the case to Income Tax Department on Friday. “They will issue warrant and conduct further investigations,” he added.
After the police alerted the officers of Income Tax (I-T) Department, they, too, reached the police station. Another senior officer said that investigators were trying to find out whether the cash was meant for distribution to woo the voters by politicos. IT officials are likely to quiz Agrawal’s son-in-law on Friday.
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