A five-minute walk from the jetty in Pathankhali village in Sundarbans, South 24 Parganas, stands an old two-storeyed building. Battered and splotched with water stains from leaky pipes, the mauve-and-green building stands bereft in the rain, its front proclaiming the current MGNREGA rates in yellow and black paint.
For the last few months, this panchayat office in the coastal village of Pathankhali has been caught in the middle of a massive row: that of forged birth certificates. It was a long probe into a statewide passport racket that led the police to allegedly make a startling discovery – that this village panchayat with around 4,000 families had allegedly generated over 3,500 fake birth certificates in two years, many of which are suspected to have been used to forge Indian passports.
An accused in the case, Gautam Sardar, is a resident of the Gram Panchayat and a casual worker at the panchayat office. Sardar, who’s said to be associated with the Trinamool Congress’s local unit, was arrested on June 7 – one of nine people arrested for oiling the wheels of the passport racket.
“He [Sardar] was the mastermind behind the fake birth certificates issued from one gram panchayat. Investigation revealed this machinery was involved in making fake documents and submitting them in getting passports of various individuals. Pathankhali and the accused are just a part of the larger racket,” Sourin Ghoshal, chief public prosecutor of the Kolkata Police, tells The Indian Express.
For unsuspecting residents of the Pathankhali gram panchayat, the scandal that broke out in their own backyard has left a lasting sense of shame.
“We never imagined this could happen here. People are calling this gram panchayat ‘India’s fake birth certificate capital’,” a resident, Dipali Munda, says. “Our relatives look down on us. One person has sullied all our reputations.”
Senior leaders of the TMC have so far refused to comment on the suspect’s alleged connection with the party.
‘We are ashamed’
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Pathankhali is one of three gram panchayats in one of Sundarbans’ many islands. With 15,000 voters, this Gram Panchayat has eight villages under it: Pathankhali, Tentultali, Bortali, Jelepara, Gopalkata, Kamarpara, Nabagopal, and Taltola.
It was during the Kolkata Police’s probe into the alleged passport racket that led to the uncovering of the “scam” in Pathankhali. According to investigators, some 400 fraudulent passports were believed to have been issued to several people – most of them allegedly Bangladeshi citizens.
The first arrests were made in January, and the probe is still ongoing. According to the police, Sardar is just one link in this big chain.
“So many fake birth certificates from one gram panchayat is something new. There are a number of cases lodged and a number of people arrested in the fake passport case. One is from the gram panchayat,” a senior Kolkata police officer tells The Indian Express.
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One of the complainants in the case is the Gram Pradhan Suchitra Bhuiyan, who had previously worked with Sardar during the 2018 panchayat polls. A leader of the Trinamool Congress, Bhuiyan was instrumental in hiring Sardar — who studied up to Class 12 — as a casual worker at the panchayat office in 2019 for Rs 3,500/year.
According to the police, Sardar allegedly used Bhuiyan’s login credentials on Janma-Mrityu Tathya — the government birth and death portal — and changed the phone number to his own, allegedly ensuring that he got the OTP needed to generate the certificates.
While producing him before the Alipore Court, the Kolkata Police said that Sardar received “huge amounts” from “other associates of the racket” and that “financial transactions from the bank account of the accused Goutam Sardar during the period from 2022 to 2025 are under the process of verification”.
“He betrayed my trust,” Gram Pradhan Bhuiyan tells The Indian Express. “The Ashoknagar Police from North 24 Parganas contacted me about the passport scam in May and sent us a birth certificate. When we verified it, we found that for the last year and a half, over 3,500 birth certificates have been issued from our gram panchayat against the usual 150-200.”
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On further examination, she allegedly found that several of those birth certificates bore the names of places in Nadia and North 24 Parganas.
“Soon, we realised Gautam was behind this. I filed a police complaint against him and informed the local administration and the [state government’s] Panchayat department. We also established a new rule – no birth certificate can be issued without my consent. The panchayat secretary was instructed to check the government portal regularly.”
According to Anarul Mollah, a booth president of the TMC, the panchayat soon discovered other alleged anomalies – for instance, time stamps on the website showed that many of the certificates were allegedly issued past 1 am.
“This was well beyond the working hours of the panchayat,” he alleges. “Sardar was the one who knew how to operate the computer. Since we had little knowledge, we little suspected what was happening.”
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Says Jasimuddin Sardar: “Everyone knows everyone else here. We used to see him buying expensive things from the market and always wondered how he had the money.”
The scandal has drawn much ridicule – not only for panchayat members but also locals. “We’re ashamed. He’s been doing this since 2023. Now villagers taunt us,” says panchayat member Rafiqul Tarafdar. “In neighbourhood too, our gram panchayat has become notorious as a fake birth certificate hub.”
But it’s not only the panchayat that bears the brunt of the alleged scam. At Gautam Sardar’s under-construction concrete house in Tetultuli village of the gram panchayat, the family claims its being cold-shouldered in the village.
“Since this broke out, it’s become difficult to live in the village,” brother Gobinda Sardar, who owns a grocery store and runs an e-rickshaw, tells The Indian Express. “When we visit the market, people make comments about what he did and how it has brought shame to the village.”
