The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has booked Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) labour and employment department secretary Kumar Rajeev Ranjan and his family members for allegedly amassing disproportionate assets more than their known sources of income, people familiar with the development said on Thursday.
A 2010-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, Ranjan, who was earlier the deputy commissioner of Kupwara, is under the scanner in the agency’s probe into irregularities in the issuance of thousands of arms licences to non-residents in J&K.
Ranjan has been named as accused along with his family members — Kirpa Shankar Roy and Dulari Devi — and unknown others in the disproportionate assets (DA) case filed by CBI on February 17, officials said.
On Wednesday, the federal agency conducted searches at seven locations, including Ranjan’s office in Jammu, and other places in Varanasi, Srinagar and Gurugram in connection with the case, the officials added.
The federal agency has not made public details of its latest DA case as to how much wealth Ranjan has amassed.
Since 2019, CBI is probing irregularities in granting over 278,000 arms licences between 2012 and 2016 in the erstwhile state of J&K — by district magistrates (DMs), deputy commissioners and licencing authorities for “monetary considerations”. Agencies estimate the alleged scam to run into over ₹100 crore.
In November last year, the Centre granted sanction to prosecute Ranjan in the arms licences probe, in which CBI had sought sanction against a total of eight IAS officers who were posted in different districts of J&K.
The entire racket was unearthed by the Rajasthan Police in 2017 after which it wrote several letters to the J&K government but did not receive any response. The Rajasthan anti-terrorism squad (ATS) claimed that 132,321 of the 143,013 licences in Doda, Ramban and Udhampur districts in Jammu region were issued to those residing outside the erstwhile state. The figure for the entire J&K was estimated to be 429,301, of which just 10% were issued to its residents.
A sample survey of licences issued from Kupwara, a frontier district in north Kashmir, showed that no files or registers were maintained by the district authorities and many of the gun licences may have been issued to outsiders on the basis of forged documents.
Earlier this week, a division bench of the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh high court comprising chief justice Tashi Rabstan and justice MA Chowdhary directed the Union home ministry to file a status report and convey its final decision regarding the prosecution sanction of three other IAS officers.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED), which also conducted a parallel money laundering probe in the arms licences racket, has claimed that the accused persons, including government servants, directly hampered the security of the state.