Two men, including a chartered accounted, allegedly cheated the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), a Delhi Police official said on Tuesday. According to a PTI news agency report, the pair cheated the ministry of over ₹3 crore under the pretext of the government-run ‘SAMRIDH’ scheme for startups.
The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police arrested the duo.
The accused pair have been identified as Prashant Agarwal (34), Director of M/s HPPL Foundation, and Sudhanshu Kumar Rakesh, a chartered accountant and partner in M/s Tripurari & Associates.
Modus operandi
Their modus operandi saw them exploit the SAMRIDH scheme by making false representations to get government funds, failing to transfer the money to selected startups and covering up the fraud with forged financial reports, the officer said. They also collected funds from startups under false pretenses.
“The case was registered on the basis of a complaint by Rashi Sharma, an authorised representative of the MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) — an autonomous division under the ministry’s Digital India Corporation,” PTI quoted Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Economic Offences Wing, Amit Verma.
The SAMRIDH scheme was developed to support startups through accelerator programmes, with a provision for matched funding of up to ₹40 lakh per startup. Agarwal headed a not-for-profit entity, M/s HPPL Foundation, and it was selected for one of the accelerators. It disbursed ₹3.04 crore for funding eight startups, but Agarwal never gave them the funds. He instead misappropriated the amount and submitted fake and forged utilisation certificates to MSH.
“These certificates were falsely certified under the seal of chartered accountant Sudhanshu Rakesh. The probe further revealed that Agarwal also collected nearly ₹11 lakh from several startups under the false promise of releasing government funds that never arrived,” the DCP said.
The police arrested Agarwal in Bengaluru on April 30. Then after a search of his premises, there was a recovery of digital devices and incriminating documents related to the crime. Then the EOW traced and arrested his associate Rakesh from Patna on May 7. Rakesh’s personal computer was found to contain templates of fake certificates and rubber stamps used in document fabrication.
Originally from Chennai, Agarwal also has a postgraduate degree in project management from Canada and an MBA from Bengaluru. M/s HPPL Foundation was founded by him in 2022, and his wife Saloni serves as director there. Meanwhile, Rakesh was born in Nalanda, and finished his chartered accountancy in 2020.
The pair have been arrested in connection under multiple sections of the IPC registered at the EOW Police Station. Further investigation is underway to identify additional beneficiaries and trace the misused funds, police said.
