Land scam, dawn arrest: Punjab officer Anupreet’s ‘fall from grace’

Anupreet Kaur was hurriedly escorted to a waiting police vehicle and driven away. By the time the local media got wind of the arrest of the serving SDM, Kaur was already in police custody.

But for all the secrecy, the arrest — announced only after the court remanded her in police custody — came as no surprise. A 2012-batch Punjab Civil Services officer, Kaur has been battling embezzlement and forgery allegations for the last six years. Officials accuse her of siphoning off Rs 1.63 crore in public money during a land acquisition drive for a national highway project. Kaur was posted in Patti, Tarn Taran, at the time of the alleged irregularities.

Other suspects booked in the case include her brother and five people investigators claim were illegal beneficiaries of the alleged racket. Kaur’s arrest came following the Punjab and Haryana High Court’s intervention in the case.

Tarn Taran Senior Superintendent of Police Surendra Lamba told The Indian Express that the arrest was made after police received an investigation report.

Kaur, who grew up in Amritsar, is a doctor by training. She completed her MBBS before passing the state civil services examination in 2012. Her first posting was in Tarn Taran district.

In November 2014, Kaur married former kabaddi player Bachittar Singh Dhillon from Tarn Taran’s Rakh Sheron village. The marriage lasted only eight months. Kaur alleged that Dhillon demanded dowry and started harassing her soon after the wedding. She claimed that immediately after her marriage, Dhillon demanded Rs 5 lakh to start a business, forcing her to borrow the money from her parents.

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She also alleged that Dhillon tried to strangle her after she refused his demands for more money. The allegations led to the registration of a case against Dhillon. At the time, police allegedly recovered 260 grams of heroin from his vehicle, leading to an additional case against him under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. The couple has since separated.

This, however, was not the end of her troubles. Controversies continued to follow her. In 2015, Kaur faced allegations of electoral misconduct, though these were never proven. Navreet Singh Shafipur, then Bharatiya Janata Party’s Tarn Taran district president, filed a formal complaint against her before Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi during his visit in December 2015.

In the complaint, Shafipur accused Kaur of manipulating voter lists and declaring defeated candidates as winners in the local body polls held earlier that year, allegedly at the behest of the Shiromani Akali Dal. Although the Election Commission took no action, the complaint appeared peculiar given that the SAD and BJP were allies in the state.

She was again in the news ahead of the 2016 Khadoor Sahib Assembly by-election, when 10 Dalit families protested outside the SDM’s office in Tarn Taran in biting cold for over two weeks, seeking compensation in the Amritsar-Bathinda national highway project. These families wanted cash compensation after their homes had been demolished to make way for the highway.

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To quell the protest, Kaur allegedly sought the intervention of senior SAD leader and Khadoor Sahib candidate Ravinder Singh Brahmpura. Kaur denied seeking the SAD leader’s help, insisting that Brahmpura had attended the meeting only as a citizen. She was once again accused of professional misconduct as only a day later, Brahmpura’s son was nominated as the SAD candidate from Khadoor Sahib.

While none of these episodes led to any formal findings against her, they ensured Kaur remained a controversial figure in Punjab’s administrative circles. But it was during her posting as SDM, Patti, from January 2018 to February 2019 that allegations of financial impropriety first surfaced.

The construction project for NH-54 — the 646-km highway connecting Pathankot in Punjab to Rajasthan’s Bikaner district — passes through Tarn Taran. A 2013 gazette notification from the Centre had already approved land acquisition in six villages in the Patti sub-division: Tatla, Harike, Nathupur, Buh, Marhana and Jaunke. Kaur was tasked with overseeing the acquisition by verifying ownership through revenue records and ensuring compensation was distributed accordingly.

According to investigators, this mandatory verification was deliberately bypassed, resulting in money being transferred into the bank accounts of five ineligible beneficiaries whose names did not appear in revenue records.

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“In the first instance, a sum of Rs 1.63 crore was transferred into the bank accounts of Jasbir Kaur, Rajwinder Kaur, Sartaj Singh, Bikramjit Singh and Gurjit Kaur, none of whom owned land in the project zone or appeared in the 2013 notification,” one investigator told The Indian Express. “Official files were manipulated to make the payments appear legitimate.”

The most damning allegation, however, involved her brother, Sandeep Singh. According to investigators, Rs 88 lakh was transferred from the same compensation fund to Sandeep Singh’s bank account for land that never existed in revenue records.

“The fraud came to light only after Dr Anupreet Kaur was transferred to Jalandhar in 2019 and her successor, Navraj Singh Brar, began reviewing the files. Brar was alarmed by what he found and forwarded a complaint to then deputy commissioner Pradeep Sabharwal,” one official said.

The first FIR in the case was filed on September 5, 2019, against Kaur and five others at City Patti police station. Kaur, who was then posted at the Jalandhar Deputy Commissioner’s office, was suspended. A second FIR followed in 2021 — on the basis of a complaint by another SDM — and also named her brother Sandeep Singh.

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The two FIRs invoked sections pertaining to cheating, criminal breach of trust, conspiracy and forgery. All suspects except Kaur were arrested in 2019 and eventually released on bail.

In 2024, Kaur was reinstated. The same year, she moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court seeking to quash the FIR against her.

That petition is still being heard. At the last hearing on April 24, the Punjab and Haryana High Court asked the Director General of Police, Punjab, to file an affidavit on the status of the probe, questioning how Kaur continued to serve as an SDM despite multiple inquiries.

Soon after her arrest, Kaur was suspended again.

Her legal representative, J S Bhullar, told the court that the officer should not be held responsible “for actions taken before her posting, because the compensation had already been approved by previous officers and her only task was disbursement”.