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Urea scam: 8 NFL officers chargesheeted
From Our Correspondent

ROPAR, May 22 — Eight officers of the National Fertilisers Ltd. (NFL) Naya Nangal, have been chargesheeted in the urea bag scam. In the charge sheet issued to these officers. It has been alleged that the bags of the lot numbers U-43, U-32 and U-33, which were passed by these officers, have been found sub-standard. The bags of these lots have failed the tests conducted by the Shiram Institute of Industrial Research, Delhi, at the behest of the Vigilance Department of the NFL.

The urea bag scam in the Naya Nangal unit of the NFL, first came to the fore in October 1999, when the recognized union here, the Fertilizer Karamchari Sangh, during a surprise check found the bales (a pack of 500 bags) to be under weight.

The company procures urea bags worth Rs 23 crore per annum.

After this incident 10 officials of the committee for sampling and testing bags were transferred and given show cause notices in December 1999.

Now five months after these officers had submitted explanations to the show cause notices, they have been issued the charge sheets. In the charge sheets it has been alleged that these officers have committed irregularities in sampling, testing, measuring physical dimensions and recording weight in the testing procedure of the above mentioned lots which led to the acceptance of the substandard bags by the company.

However, the officers who been chargesheeted blame the testing procedure of NFL for the acceptance of sub-standard bags. They have alleged that according to the norms, which were accepted in NFL, earlier, just 50 randomly selected bags out of the lot of 75000 were tested. This small sample was unviable to show the standards of the entire lot. Moreover, there was no provision for the weighing of the bales to detect the average presence of the underweight bags, they alleged. The NFL has now rectified this shortcoming in their testing procedures of the bags.

The NFL has appointed, Mr SC Kulshreshtha, a retired senior General Manager of the KRIBHCO, to investigate the urea bag scam. The sources say that during his preliminary investigation, he has also told the testing procedure adopted by the NFL, to be faulty.