January 1996 by despatching one of his additional secretaries to make an enquiry of the excessive drawls of money by Animal Husbandry department from Ranchi treasury. The enquiry revealed a whole scale loot of government money; drawn fraudulently by forged documents. Then on 27 January 1996, the deputy commissioner of West Singhbhum district, Amit Khare, acted on direction from Vijai Shankar Dubey to conduct a raid on the offices of the animal husbandry department in the town of Chaibasa in the district under his authority. The documents his team seized, and went public with, conclusively indicated large-scale embezzlement by an organised mafia of officials and business people. The news of fodder scam was first broken out by Indian journalist Ravi S Jha, who working with the Asian Age then in Calcutta, named the then Bihar Chief Minister of having implicit involvement in the scam. Based on evidence collected by him from Chaibasa, Jha not only found out widespread involvement of Bihar government machinery in the scam, he even mentioned how earlier governments too were taking advantage of a shoddy system, where top government officials along with the ministers were flouting norms to make money illegally. Jha, an associate director of Public Affairs, is currently working with anti-corruption crusader and good governance promoter Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament. Lalu ordered the constitution of a committee to probe the irregularities. There were fears that state police, which is accountable to the state administration, and the probe committee would not investigate the case vigorously, and demands were raised to transfer the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is under federal rather than state jurisdiction. Allegations were also made that several of the probe committee members were themselves complicit in the scam. A public interest litigation was filed with the Supreme Court of India, which led to the court's involvement, and based on the ultimate directions issued by the supreme court, in March 1996, the Patna High Court ordered that the case be handed over to the CBI. An inquiry by the CBI began and, within days, the CBI filed a submission to the High Court that Bihar officials and legislators were blocking access to documents that could reveal the existence of a politician-official-business mafia nexus at work. Some legislators of the Bihar Legislative Council responded by claiming the court had been misinformed by the CBI and initiating