A special CBI court in Ranchi has sentenced RJD chief Lalu Yadav to five years imprisonment while former CM Jagannath Mishra and JDU MP Jagdish Sharma got four years jail in the fodder scam

Lalu Prasad Yadav, the chief of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and former chief minister of Bihar has been sentenced to five years imprisonment by the special Court of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the multi-crore fodder scam. Bihar's former CM Jagannath Mishra and Jagdish Sharma, the member of Parliament (MP) from Janata Dal (United) have been sentenced four year jail term, each. Yadav has also been fined Rs25 lakh in the scam. The CBI court has awarded five-year imprisonment to former district animal husbandry officer BN Sharma while imposing a fine of Rs1.5 crore.

The sentencing by special CBI judge Pravas Kumar Singh disqualifies the RJD leader from Parliament and renders him ineligible for contesting elections for 11 years.

Six other politicians and four IAS officers, among the convicted, were also sentenced to prison terms for fraudulent withdrawal of Rs37.7 crore from the Chaibasa treasury when Prasad was heading the RJD government in the early 1990s.

A sitting MP from Jahanabad, Sharma also faces disqualification in the wake of a Supreme Court judgement that an MP or MLA would stand disqualified immediately if convicted by a court for crimes with punishment of two years or more and under some other laws even without jail sentence.

RJD spokesperson Manoj Jha has said the verdict would be challenged in a higher court.

The fodder scam was a corruption scandal that involved the embezzlement of about Rs950 crore (equivalent to Rs2,000 crore or $310 million in 2013) from the government treasury of Bihar. Among those implicated in the theft and arrested were Lalu Yadav, the then chief minister of Bihar as well as former CM Mishra. The scandal led to the end of Yadav's reign as chief minister of Bihar. On 25 July 1997, Lalu resigned from his position, but installed his wife Ravri Devi as the new chief minister of Bihar. On 28 July 1997, Rabri's new government won another vote of confidence in the Bihar legislature by 194–110, thanks to the Congress and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha voting in alignment with the RJD.

There were also allegation on Nitish Kumar and Shivanand Tiwari of receiving Rs1 crore and Rs60 lakh, respectively from SB Sinha.

The theft spanned many years, and allegedly involved numerous administrative and elected officials across multiple administrations of the Congress and the Janata Dal parties. The corruption scheme involved the fabrication of "vast herds of fictitious livestock" for which fodder, medicines and animal husbandry equipment was supposedly procured.

Although the scandal broke in 1996, the theft had been in progress, and increased in size, for over two decades. Besides the magnitude and duration of the theft, the scam was and continues to be covered in Indian media due to the extensive nexus between tenured bureaucrats, elected politicians and businesspeople that it revealed, and as an example of the mafia raj that has penetrated several state-run economic sectors in the country.

As of May 2013, the trial has completed in 44 cases out of a total of 53 cases. More than 500 accused have been convicted and awarded punishments by various courts.

In 1992, Bidhu Bhushan Dvivedi, a police inspector with Bihar's anti-corruption vigilance unit submitted a report outlining the fodder scam and likely involvement at the chief ministerial level to the director general of the same vigilance unit, G Narayan. In alleged reprisal, Dvivedi was transferred out of the vigilance unit to a different branch of the administration, and then suspended from his position. He later became a witness as corruption cases relating to the scam went to trial, and reinstated by order of the Jharkhand High Court.