In Pathankhali village, located in the Sundarbans region of South 24 Parganas, there is an old two-storey building that serves as the village panchayat office. The building, painted in fading mauve and green, shows clear signs of wear, water stains from leaking pipes run down its walls, and the rain adds to its rundown look. On the front wall, the current MGNREGA wage rates are displayed in yellow and black paint, highlighting its official purpose. However, over the past few months, this panchayat office has found itself at the centre of a major controversy. During an investigation into a statewide passport racket, authorities uncovered a startling fact: the Pathankhali gram panchayat had allegedly issued over 3,500 fake birth certificates in just two years. Many of these are believed to have been used to apply for fraudulent Indian passports.
Among those implicated is Gautam Sardar, a casual employee at the panchayat office and a resident of the village. Reportedly linked to the local unit of the Trinamool Congress, Sardar was arrested on June 7, one of nine individuals accused of facilitating the passport racket.
“He [Sardar] was the key orchestrator behind the fake birth certificates issued from a single gram panchayat,” said Sourin Ghoshal, chief public prosecutor of the Kolkata Police. “The investigation uncovered a wider operation involved in creating forged documents, which were then used to obtain passports for various individuals. Pathankhali and the accused are just one link in a much larger network.”
For the unsuspecting residents of Pathankhali gram panchayat, the scandal unfolding in their own village has brought a deep sense of shame.
“We never thought something like this could happen here. Now people are calling our panchayat ‘India’s fake birth certificate capital’,” says Dipali Munda, a local resident. “Our relatives look down on us. One person’s actions have tarnished the reputation of the whole village.” So far, senior leaders of the Trinamool Congress have declined to comment on the accused’s alleged ties to the party.
Pathankhali is one of three gram panchayats located on one of the many islands in the Sundarbans. Home to around 15,000 voters, this gram panchayat encompasses eight villages: Pathankhali, Tentultali, Bortali, Jelepara, Gopalkata, Kamarpara, Nabagopal, and Taltola. The alleged scam came to light during a Kolkata Police investigation into a broader passport racket. According to investigators, nearly 400 fraudulent passports may have been issued, many suspected to have been obtained by Bangladeshi nationals using forged documents. The first arrests in the case were made back in January, and the investigation remains active. Police say Gautam Sardar is just one part of a much larger operation.
“The sheer number of fake birth certificates coming from a single gram panchayat is unprecedented,” a senior Kolkata Police officer said. “Several cases have been registered, and multiple arrests made in connection with the fake passport racket, including at least one from the Pathankhali gram panchayat.”
One of the key complainants in the case is Gram Pradhan Suchitra Bhuiyan, a Trinamool Congress leader who had previously worked alongside Gautam Sardar during the 2018 panchayat elections. It was Bhuiyan who played a pivotal role in hiring Sardar, who had studied up to Class 12, as a casual worker at the panchayat office in 2019, with an annual pay of just Rs 3,500.
According to police, Sardar allegedly misused Bhuiyan’s login credentials for Janma-Mrityu Tathya, the government’s birth and death registration portal. He reportedly changed the registered phone number to his own, enabling him to receive the OTPs required to generate fake birth certificates.
While presenting him in Alipore Court, Kolkata Police told the court that Sardar had received “huge amounts” of money from “other associates of the racket,” and that financial transactions from his bank account between 2022 and 2025 are currently under scrutiny.
“He betrayed my trust,” Bhuiyan told. “In May, Ashoknagar Police from North 24 Parganas contacted me about a suspicious passport case and sent us a birth certificate for verification. That’s when we discovered the scale of the fraud, over the past year and a half, more than 3,500 birth certificates had been issued from our gram panchayat, where normally we process only 150 to 200.”
Upon further investigation, Bhuiyan discovered that many of the fake birth certificates listed places in Nadia and North 24 Parganas, far from their own area.
“We soon realized Gautam was behind the fraud,” she said. “I filed a police complaint against him and alerted the local administration as well as the state government’s Panchayat department. We also introduced a new rule: no birth certificate can be issued without my approval. The panchayat secretary was instructed to regularly monitor the government portal.”
Anarul Mollah, a TMC booth president, said the panchayat uncovered additional irregularities, such as timestamps on the portal showing that many certificates were issued well past 1 am.
“This was far beyond the official working hours of the panchayat,” he claimed. “Sardar was the only one who knew how to operate the computer. With our limited knowledge, we had little idea of what was going on.”
Jasimuddin Sardar remarks, “Everyone here knows each other. We often saw him buying expensive things from the market and always wondered where he got the money from.”
The scandal has brought widespread ridicule, not just for the panchayat members but for the entire community. “We’re ashamed. He’s been involved in this since 2023, and now villagers openly mock us,” says panchayat member Rafiqul Tarafdar. “Even in nearby areas, our gram panchayat has gained a reputation as a hub for fake birth certificates.” The fallout hasn’t just affected the panchayat officials. At Gautam Sardar’s under-construction concrete house in Tetultuli village, his family says they are being shunned by the community.
“Since this scandal broke, life in the village has become difficult,” says his brother Gobinda Sardar, who runs a grocery store and an e-rickshaw. “When we go to the market, people make remarks about what he did and how it has brought shame to the entire village.”
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