The Central Bureau of Investigation was on Thursday granted seven-day custody of West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) former chairman Ashok Saha and ex-adviser Shanti Prasad Sinha in an alleged staff recruitment scam in government-aided schools.
The accused, arrested by the agency on Wednesday, were produced in the special CBI court in Alipore seeking their remand for seven days.
The CBI claimed in the court that there was a “larger conspiracy” in the recruitment of school teachers and therefore it was important to question them. It said that many influential people were suspected to be linked to the alleged scam. The central agency informed the court that the Right to Information Act (RTI) was used to know the number of vacancies and the recruitment was done accordingly. No transparency was followed in the entire process and the two — Shanti Prasad Sinha and Ashok Saha —needed to be interrogated further to find who all were involved in the larger conspiracy, it further said.
The CBI had filed a case on May 20 on the orders the Calcutta High Court against five persons and other unidentified people. It has been alleged that the accused extended undue advantage to undeserving and unlisted candidates to the posts of Group-C staff in various schools of the state.
It was alleged that the accused collected information on Group-C vacancies in an unauthorised manner in 2019 after the recruitment committee expiry in violation of the provisions of the School Service Commission Rules, 2009, and issued recommendations of unsuccessful candidates by issuing fictitious memos of regional commissions and using scanned signatures of their chairpersons without their knowledge.
It is claimed that on the basis of these recommendations, appointment letters were issued bypassing the normal chain of hierarchy and without sending recommendation letters to the Board of Secondary Education’s appointment section.c
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School jobs scam: CBI gets seven-day custody of former SSC … – The Indian Express
