Cuttack, March 11: The focus of the Justice Madan Mohan Das Commission has shifted to compensation for small investors duped by deposit collection companies with the state government enlarging its scope.

The panel is now expected to identify genuine small investors, who are eligible for compensation.

Justice Madan Mohan Das told The Telegraph the identification process, according to the terms of reference added by the government, would be undertaken on the basis of records of investors from the affidavits received by the panel that had received over eight lakh affidavits. Most of these were submitted by the investors in unauthorised collection companies, with the hope of getting back their money.

The additional job assigned to the commission is "to identify the bona fide investors affected by transactions of fraudulent financial establishments or companies and to suggest the modality of payment of compensation, the names of small investors eligible for compensation, and the amount of compensation payable from the corpus fund or otherwise".

The government had kept aside Rs 300 crore towards a corpus fund to protect the depositors' interest in the supplementary budget for 2014-15.

Justice Das said: "The affidavits are being digitised for database creation. The commission will submit an interim report after the data is culled from a substantial number of affidavits." The database will contain details such as company names, names of depositors with address, amount deposited, amount received by the depositor, balance amount due to be received and so on.

Commission secretary Devraj Rout said nearly 1.5 lakh affidavits had been digitised.

Chief minister Naveen Patnaik had appointed Justice R.K. Patra, a retired Orissa High Court judge, as head of the single-member judicial commission on July 9, 2013.

Justice Das was appointed to conduct the probe after Justice Patra's death on January 28.