Lucknow/New Delhi, Jan 6 (IANS) With two Uttar Pradesh officials and a businessman taken into custody Friday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested four people for the Rs.8,000 crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam in the state.

The three arrests were made at the CBI headquarters in Delhi where the officials and the businessman were brought for interrogation.

Those taken into custody by the CBI Friday were former Uttar Pradesh health and family welfare director general S.P. Ram, UP Small Industries Corporation (UPSIC) general manager Abhay Kumar Bajpai and Moradabad-based businessman Sourav Jain, who was involved in supplying medical equipment and medicines under the NRHM programme.

P.K. Jain, former general manager of the Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam Construction and Design, was arrested Thursday, shortly after he was questioned by CBI sleuths in New Delhi.

The arrests came after the agency carried out inter-state searches at about 60 locations in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi, including the residence of ousted Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) minister Babu Singh Kushwaha and his close associates, in an effort to unravel the NRHM scam.

“Apart from a lot of incriminating documents seized from the possession of these persons, much evidence has been gathered during the course of interrogation of these four people,” said a CBI source.

“There was glaring incidence of heavy over-invoicing,” he said.

According to him, “the owner of the private firm who was arrested Friday morning, had suddenly become a medical supplier after having spent years selling construction material.”

“What was surprising was that within days of getting his firm registered as a medical equipment and drug supplier, he bagged contracts for the supply of such material worth crores and that too at highly inflated prices.”

The CBI has reason to believe that the transactions carried out between Jain and NRHM state bosses involved huge kickbacks.

The source was, however, silent on the prospect of arresting Kushwaha. “We are still collecting evidence against the former minister and some of his close associates who clearly appear to be direct beneficiaries of the suspected kickbacks,” the source said.

Another important politician on the CBI radar is former health minister Anant Kumar Misra, closely related to Chief Minister Mayawati’s close confidante Satish Chandra Misra.

Anant Kumar Misra too was asked to tender his resignation along with Kushwaha in April 2011, when the NRHM cauldron started boiling over in Uttar Pradesh.