Orissa chit fund probe commission chief dies

After the chit fund scam broke in 2011, the Naveen Patnaik government framed the Orissa Protection of Interest of Depositors Act, that was made into law in August 2013. Patnaik also announced a Rs 300-crore corpus fund called ‘fund for protection of interest of depositors’, from which compensation would be paid to the depositors.

With Patra’s death, the wait for lakhs of chit fund victims of Orissa to get back their money from the ponzi companies got a little longer. The state government, in July 2013 had appointed Patra as the chairman of the chit fund probe panel to hear the complaints of the depositors and take steps for return of their money. But with little logistical support from government the Commission had been struggling to peruse the affidavits of the duped investors, despite getting three extensions.

Of the 9.9 lakh envelopes that it received at its Cuttack office containing affidavits of investors, it had managed to segregate around a lakh into small and big investors.

Of the 1 lakh affidavits, about 40 per cent were found to have claims below Rs 10,000, which the government is mulling to make the bar for determining a small investor.

Recently, chief secretary GC Pati had ordered for provision of 50 data-entry operators who would work in two shifts daily to complete the scanning and data entry of all the affidavits within next three months.

The government was mulling whether the small invstors who were duped can be compensated on the basis of an interim report of the Patra commission like the Shyamal Sen committee on whose recommendation, over 5 lakh chit fund scam victims have been compensated in Bengal.