Twenty-one people, including four headmasters, have been arrested by CID sleuths from four Assam districts for allegedly misappropriating pre-matric scholarship funds for the past two fiscals.

Of the 21 arrested since Sunday evening by the CID sleuths with help of the local police from multiple locations spread over four districts — seven from Goalpara, seven from Darrang, six from Kamrup and one from Dhubri.

“About Rs 10 crore has been misappropriated but the exact amount will be known after the probe is completed,” IGP (CID) Surendra Kumar said, conveying that the scale of the fraudulent operations.

All the 21 accused were produced in the CJM court here on Tuesday. Six of them were sent judicial custody. The remaining 15 were sent to four days police remand each, Kumar said.

The CID started probing after an FIR was lodged by Mahmood Hassan, director, Assam Minority Board and state nodal officer for the pre-matric scholarship for minorities on August 28 for alleged misappropriation of funds for minority students for the year 2018-19 and 2019-20.

There are two layers of verification of candidates, one at the school level and one at the district level but the fraudsters managed to create login credentials of the headmasters (where they were not in league) and managed to get into the system and siphon of funds, a CID official said.

The case (20/2020) has been registered under Sections 120 (B),/406/409/419/420/468/471 of the IPC dealing with criminal conspiracy, forgery and cheating, among others.

The arrested include four headmasters, one teacher, three customer service point owners, one president of school management committee, 10 middlemen and three electronic data processors, suggesting the presence of a well-entrenched racket.

From one of the arrested persons from Goalpara, three laptops, 217 photographs of students, 104 student certificate, 173 pre-matric scholarship application forms and 11 bank passbooks were recovered.

The fully Central government-funded scholarship implemented by the Union ministry of minority affairs is for students from Class 1 to X who have secured 50 per cent and above in the final exams and whose parents/guardians annual income is less than Rs 1 lakh.

Students from the five minority communities are Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Parsi and Jain are eligible to apply online for the scholarship and the scholarship amount (Rs 10700 per student per year is directly transferred to the account of the eligible students.