Arunachal's Anti-Corruption Bureau has arrested yet another accused in a Rs 130 crore scam where land compensation for the strategically critical Lada-Sarli stretch of the Arunachal Frontier Highway — the border road to China — was siphoned through 'inflated awards, fake or non-existent assets.' The road whose whole purpose is proving India controls this terrain paid crores for territory and structures that never existed.
The Arunachal Frontier Highway is supposed to be India's strategic answer to Chinese road-building along the Line of Actual Control — a muscular declaration that this land is ours, right down to the last valley. Which makes it deeply inconvenient that compensation was paid for land parcels and built assets along the Lada-Sarli stretch in East Kameng that, on closer inspection, do not physically exist. The Anti-Corruption Bureau has now nabbed another accused — Karbia Rebe — in what has grown into a Rs 130 crore scam involving a former District Land Revenue officer, private brokers, and bribes totaling over Rs 19 crore in some segments alone. India's case to the world is that these border villages are Indian. India's payroll, apparently, included villages that weren't even real. Somewhere a PLA cartographer is updating a spreadsheet with considerable satisfaction.