The Central Bureau of Investigation has launched a probe into a Gadchiroli postal employee accused of misappropriating Rs 13.56 lakh from customer accounts, highlighting a rising pattern of postal fraud across Maharashtra’s smaller branches with weak controls and record-keeping lapses.
The Central Bureau of Investigation has opened a case against a postal department employee in Gadchiroli over allegations that cash deposited by customers was taken but never properly entered into the accounts system. The agency says F.K. Pathan, who worked as a gramin dak sevak at the Rangi branch post office, acknowledged deposits in passbooks by hand but failed to record the money in the official books. The alleged shortfall, covering savings, recurring deposit, Sukanya Samriddhi and rural postal life insurance accounts, is put at Rs 13.56 lakh. Reuters-style reporting on other postal fraud cases in Maharashtra shows that investigators have been pursuing a series of similar complaints involving branch-level staff and missing deposit records.
According to the CBI, the alleged misconduct stretched from 2015 to 2021 and included Rs 10.76 lakh in principal and Rs 2.8 lakh in interest. The agency said Pathan’s writing and signature appeared on the passbook entries, which suggests the deposits were at least temporarily acknowledged at the counter before disappearing from the ledgers. In a separate case in Chandrapur, the CBI also examined allegations that postal officials misappropriated Rs 15.95 lakh from recurring deposit accounts by using forged withdrawal slips and fake closures, underscoring how vulnerable small branch operations can be when basic controls are weak.
The Gadchiroli matter began with an internal postal department inquiry before a formal complaint was sent to the CBI, which then registered offences including criminal breach of trust, falsification of records and criminal misconduct by a public servant. That sequence mirrors other cases in the postal network, including a referral near Paradip in which alleged embezzlement of about Rs 20 lakh from Monthly Income Scheme and recurring deposit accounts was discovered after a depositor sought to claim matured savings. In those cases, records were seized and depositor statements were taken as investigators tried to establish the flow of funds.
The latest case adds to a broader pattern of alleged postal fraud in Maharashtra. In Ratnagiri, the CBI booked a sub-postmaster over claims that funds from dormant savings accounts were diverted using forged signatures, while a separate Nagpur case involved allegations of misappropriation from savings and Sukanya Samriddhi accounts. Together, the cases point to a recurring problem in which small cash transactions, manual passbook entries and delayed audits can leave gaps that are exploited before discrepancies come to light.
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