Five years ago Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit launched a scheme for the specially-abled in a much lauded effort to make them self-reliant.

But some of the supposed beneficiaries claim that the scheme has been hijacked by the mafia.

Some 3.6 lakh passengers use the New Delhi railway station every day. Recently Rahul Gandhi passed through it to travel to Chandigarh and back.

When at the station, it is impossible to miss the many yellow phone booths mounted on tricycles. It is also impossible to miss the people who run them.  These phone booths actually symbolise deep rooted corruption.

And their disabled owners are it’s victims.

The ambitious scheme should have benefited people like twenty-one-year old Prem Kumar Sharma, alias Pandit. Instead, he reveals names of middlemen who are the real owners.

A NewsX investigation has uncovered that 32 mobile phone booths around Delhi, set up for the disabled, are actually owned by one man - Mustakeem. His gang is always on the lookout for poor, disabled people who come to Delhi in search of a better life.

It was a Rs 1 crore scheme in all. Each booth, worth Rs 20,000, was to have been given to a disabled person for a living. But a deeper look reveals that it does not work this way.

The real owner of these mobile phone booths is Mustakeem. He hires people like Pandit to run them, who pay him upto Rs 15,000 a month as a fee. In return, they get food and a pitiable Rs 1,000 a month to stay alive.

Mustakeem, meanwhile, makes more than Rs 5 lakhs a month from all of his 32 booths.

Mustakeem admitted on hidden camera the way he operates his racket with the help of various government organizations.

He divulged how he procured 20 such mobile booths by paying off the police and the committees on a monthly basis. Mustakeem also admitted that these mobile phone booths do not belong to the disabled men, who are running it.

NewsX special investigation team met Delhi’s PWD minister, Rajkumar Chauhan, and asked him if he was aware of the corruption in schemes for the disabled.

Chauhan blatantly justified all evil, saying it was not a crime as long the handicapped people earned some money out of it.

Javed Abidi, convenor of Disabled Rights Group, says hijacking of schemes for disabled people is a criminal activity that could land one in jail for a minimum of two years.

An emblematic vignette of corruption in India, these yellow mobile phone booths no longer symbolise self-reliance but an exploitative system.

This scandal came to light because someone, who was directly affected, came up to NewsX to relate their pain. We’d like to hear from you on more issues that you feel deserve justice through exposure.