An FIR has landed on three cooperative society employees in Bareli, Raisen district, after Madhya Pradesh's Economic Offences Wing traced a ₹13.34 lakh scam built around the state's moong pulse procurement scheme.

The accused are Ranjeet Thakur along with two computer operators, Gourav Thakur and Shri Ram Thakur, each attached to a different cooperative society, officials said on Wednesday. The EOW registered the case after acting on a complaint, and what it found was a fairly simple exploit run over two years.

Here's how it worked, according to the EOW. When the state government opened procurement of moong pulse at Minimum Support Price, the three allegedly opened accounts under the names of landowners who weren't registered on the official portal. Using those accounts, they bought moong from the open market at rock-bottom rates, anywhere between Rs 1,500 and Rs 3,300 per quintal.

Then they turned around and sold that same pulse to the government scheme at Rs 8,558 to Rs 8,628 per quintal.

The math isn't complicated. Buy low from farmers who don't officially exist on paper, sell high to a government that's paying MSP without checking too closely who's on the other end of the transaction. The EOW says the trio pocketed Rs 13.34 lakh through the scheme between 2024 and 2026.

What's notable here is the timeline. This wasn't a one-off transaction that slipped through. Investigators say the conspiracy ran for roughly two years before it was flagged, which raises the obvious question of how many similar accounts might exist across other cooperative societies running the same MSP scheme in the state.

The EOW hasn't said whether more arrests or additional societies are under scrutiny. For now, the case rests on the three named employees and the FIR filed against them in Bhopal.

Moong procurement at MSP is meant to protect farmers from distress sales, guaranteeing them a floor price regardless of what the open market is offering. Cases like this one turn that safety net into an arbitrage opportunity, with the difference between market rate and MSP becoming someone's private profit instead of a farmer's income support.

The accused have not yet responded publicly to the allegations, and no charges have been proven in court. The EOW's investigation is ongoing, and it remains to be seen whether the ₹13.34 lakh figure holds as the sole scope of the fraud or whether the audit trail widens once investigators start pulling more account records from the portal.