25 May,2026 08:13 PM IST | Mumbai | Aishwarya Iyer
The alleged fraud surfaced during a performance audit conducted between April 6 and May 7, 2026. Representational pic
The International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), a Central government-run institute in Mumbai's Govandi, has approached the police alleging a Rs 14.48-lakh payroll fraud and accusing two of its employees of manipulating attendance and overtime records of contractual workers in the institute.
The Govandi Police on Friday booked 27-year-old Tejas Ganesh Gadekar, an upper division clerk (UDC), and Jisha Prasanna, a Steno Grade-2 employee, under provisions of the Information Technology Act and Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for data manipulation, identify misuse, and computer-based cheating along with forgery.
According to the police, a first information report (FIR) was filed by Dr Devram Abhiman Nagdeve (60), a senior professor who is currently holding additional charge as the director of IIPS. In his statement, he said that the institute in August 2025 had recruited 52 contractual workers through DN Enterprises, an outsourcing agency based in Deonar.
The workers, hired on contract from August 11, 2025, included cooks, office assistants, account staff, multitasking staff (MTS), attendants, IT engineers, and healthcare attendants. Their attendance and overtime hours were monitored through an Aadhaar-based biometric attendance system and salary bills were generated on that basis.
Gadekar, the primary accused, allegedly prepared salary bills of the contractual employees, while Prasanna, the other accused, was responsible for verifying whether attendance, overtime, and salary calculations matched records before they were processed further.
The alleged fraud surfaced during a performance audit conducted between April 6 and May 7, 2026, when officials from the institute's finance department noticed discrepancies in payments made between August 2025 and March 2026.
The institute then formed an internal inquiry committee headed by Dr Nagdeve. During the inquiry, contractual MTS employee Vijay Prakash Ingle was questioned after inconsistencies were found in his records. It was found that he had received Rs 21,452 in excess payment. Ingle claimed that Gadekar had increased overtime hours and that money had also been paid to him in return.
Police said scrutiny of salary records and biometric data allegedly revealed that overtime figures of 43 of the 52 contractual workers had been inflated. It is now suspected that attendance data from the Aadhaar-based system was exported into Excel sheets, modified and then used to generate inflated salary bills.
"The complainant has said that salary bills worth Rs 15.77 lakh were approved when the actual payable amount should have been Rs 1.28 lakh, resulting in an alleged excess payout of Rs 14.48 lakh to contractual workers. We are now investigating the matter by questioning the ones involved, while conducting a parallel technical investigation," a police official from Govandi said.
