Odisha is apparently in ‘real’ trouble over growing ‘fake’ currency circulation. The State, trends suggest, is slowly emerging as the transit home of high quality Fake Indian Currency
Notes (FICN) – a lifeline of terror finance – as operatives in West Bengal in order to duck the dragnet appear to have shifted focus to Odisha following intense surveillance and crackdown by police and intelligence agencies.
Even, recently Chhattisgarh has launched a covert operation to crack down on the smuggling in of FICNs from Odisha borders.
Numbers tell the tale. When between 2012 and 2014, West Bengal
recorded a dip in value of FICNs seized and recovered by as high as around 60 per cent, Odisha recorded an eye-popping 375 per cent rise in value of FICNs recovered and seized during the same period. The State in 2014 recorded a total impoundment (including by RBI) of FICNs worth Rs 18.9 lakh against mere Rs 4.5 lakh in 2012, suggests the data available with NCRB and RBI here.
Moreover, the seizure quantity of FICNs (of 1,000 and 500 denominations) by State police in 2015 has been four times more than that of last year. While FICNs of
Rs 1,000 denomination seized and recovered has shown a mind-boggling 260 per cent rise since 2012, a whopping 360 per cent rise in denominations of Rs 500 FICNs was recorded. And, the shocker is the push of such FICNs in State has been in semi-urban areas where the police intelligence simply exists on paper.
According to a NIA investigation done with Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India limited (SPMICl) on the samples of fake currencies netted across the country, including Odisha, almost all samples of high-quality FICNs have very close technical built-in resemblances with the currency from a ‘neighbouring country’ – which is none other than Pakistan, said a senior NIA official. He further added with Nepal route being sanitised, pumping of FICNs from Bangladesh through West Bengal into India is still worrisome. And, as the FICN smuggler or criminal network in WB is under high surveillance of IB, Odisha is feeling the nudge in last few years, he remarked.
How the terror modules mint ‘genuine’ fund over ‘fake’ moneyIJ As per NIA official, FICN criminal network sent ‘fake’ consignments to their agents across the country and collect 60 per cent of ‘real value’ of such consignments from them, and in this way they mop up real Indian currency to fund their terror network.
He added that the money is routed to the bank accounts of the chief operators in tranches of maximum of Rs 49,000 to duck the tracking by IT Department. Currently, transactions of over Rs 50,000 require PAN number as assigned by the IT Department. “At present, the State police here treat FICN cases on individual basis. Being neighbours to WB, police should have shown more alertness and a cohesive strategy to impound the network at work here,” the official observed.