NEW DELHI: In a major crackdown on systemic financial manipulation on national highways, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted simultaneous multi-state search operations at 14 premises across seven states and Union Territories. The raids are part of a money-laundering investigation into alleged fraudulent toll collection and revenue diversion at National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) toll plazas.
The search operations, launched early Wednesday morning under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), spanned locations in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal (including Kolkata), and the Delhi-NCR region.
According to ED officials, the probe stems from police FIRs and an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) registered after severe irregularities came to light. The investigation uncovered the deployment of unauthorised, rogue software applications at several toll booths.
At an official toll booth, vehicle payments are registered digitally to reconcile with state and central accounting ledgers. The suspect software allegedly bypassed the legitimate system to generate non-standard or fake receipts.
Toll collected via these unauthorised receipts was kept entirely out of official government ledgers, allowing operators or syndicates to siphon off crores of rupees in cash directly.
Officials stated that preliminary forensic examinations of digital systems, combined with cross-verification against NHAI transaction data, confirmed that such illegitimate software had actively been operating.
Teams of ED sleuths, accompanied by central security forces, searched commercial offices, residences of private toll contractors, and computer server nodes. In Kolkata, ED officials searched premises linked to prominent local business figures operating plaza contracts.
Investigators are currently seizing digital storage drives, financial ledgers, and server logs to identify the software developers who authored the illegal programs, trace the financial flow of the diverted proceeds, and uncover the primary beneficiaries within the operating syndicates.
The agency has indicated that the scope of the investigation could broaden further as data extracted from the seized hardware undergoes forensic analysis to establish whether this was a localized manipulation or a nationwide organized network.
