Rupees twenty-five
Published 3 October 2026
Forgery cases are usually won on small, silly details. The Haryana FIR has several, and one of them has the quality of a punchline.
The cheque with two amounts
The FIR, as reported by BusinessLine, says the committee examining the accounts found that one of the cheques the bank processed mentions the amount in figures as Rs 2.50 crore, while the amount in words is written as "Rupees twenty five". It was honoured and processed. A cheque on which figures and words disagree is returned by most banks on sight, so the committee treated it as a sign of a serious discrepancy in how the bank handled the instrument.
The same inquiry found cheques with forged signatures of the then Director General (Development and Panchayats), D K Behera, despite the fact that he had relinquished charge on 28 October 2025. The debit notes attached to the cheques, the FIR said, had no memo number or dispatch number and appeared to carry a forged signature as well. The department's position, per the committee, was that it used debit notes for fund transfers under the scheme, for transactions approved by the competent authority, and that no fund transfer instructions were issued against these two bank accounts by the department as per the record in the files.
The committee's conclusion, which is part of the FIR, was that it seemed to be a case of forgery and procedural lapse by officials of both banks, and it recommended a thorough police investigation. The CBI's later chargesheet adds a wrinkle about the signature. According to ThePrint, cheques bearing what the CBI's own papers describe as Behera's signature were used in transactions worth crores from an account opened during his tenure, but the signatures' authenticity is still to be confirmed through forensic examination, and the department's inquiry had said they were forged. Behera was not among the six IAS officers chargesheeted on 2 September.
A second bank, a second cheque
The CBI's papers add transactions from both banks in this period. On Monday, 29 December 2025, per the Tribune's account of the CBI file, a Rs 25 crore debit was made from the HPGCL Pension Fund Trust's account at AU Small Finance Bank. The Mohali branch manager allegedly made the call confirmation through Abhay Kumar's phone and filled in the body of the cheque. And on 14 January 2026, a Rs 10 crore debit hit the Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board's account at IDFC First Bank; area head Shamim Dar, an accused, claimed to have made the call confirmation, but under the bank's procedure it should have been made by a branch operations person such as the manager, maker or checker. The funds moved first to the bank's general ledger, so no SMS went out, and then to two shell entities.
The Hindu BusinessLine and The Tribune are both quoting the CBI's and the FIR's account here, and neither tells us how the AU Small Finance Bank reacted. AU's response in February, per Hindustan Times, was that following a preliminary review there was no indication of any financial impact or any fraudulent activity towards it. The CBI's third chargesheet nonetheless names one AU Small Finance Bank officer among the 19 accused. The bank's own view on the chargesheet is not in the sources reviewed.
What a clerk would have noticed
The point of listing the cheque details is not that the bank made a clerical error. It is that, on the committee's findings, the instruments carried mismatches visible to a person looking at them, and the transactions went through anyway. The CBI says the explanation is that people inside the banks were handling them with knowledge. The banks say the controls failed because of collusion. Both explanations describe a system in which the visible warnings were bypassed rather than missed.
The cheque with two amounts is one of the pieces of paper that began the end. The committee that found it had been formed on 11 February 2026. The reason it was formed was a letter, sent on 13 January, that asked a bank to return the department's money.
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