A Kolkata court on Friday sent former president of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education Kalyanmoy Ganguly to the custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation till September 21 in an alleged scam in the recruitment of non-teaching staff in the state in 2018, reported ANI.
Earlier on Friday, the CBI arrested Ganguly after its officials questioned him for six hours on Thursday. The central agency had registered a first information report against Ganguly and four other members of the School Service Commission on May 20 on charges of forgery, cheating and criminal conspiracy.
Ganguly was arrested after the investigators found a mismatch between his statements and the recorded statements of two School Service Commission officials – former advisory committee chairperson Santi Prasad Sinha and former secretary Ashok Kumar Saha – reported The Times of India.
The CBI had arrested Sinha and Saha on August 10.
Ganguly has been accused of giving orders to issue fake appointment letters while Sinha and Saha manipulated ranks of candidates selected in the State Level Selection Test, reported The Times of India.
A Calcutta High Court-appointed committee, led by retired judge Ranjit Kumar Bagh said in its report in May that at least 609 illegal appointments in group D employees’ posts, 381 in clerical posts and a yet-to-be determined number of posts for assistant teachers for classes 9 and 10 at government-sponsored and aided schools took place in West Bengal between 2019 and 2020.
The committee for recruiting teaching and non-teaching appointments in state-run schools was set up by former West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee after the expiry of the School Service Commission panel on May 18, 2019.
The Trinamool Congress leader along with his aide Arpita Mukherjee, was arrested on July 23 by the Enforcement Directorate, which is investigating allegations of money-laundering in the case.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal unit chief Sukanta Majumdar said that Ganguly’s arrest showed that the Trinamool Congress government was neck deep in corruption, PTI reported.
“The Trinamool Congress might try to wash its hands off, but the day is not far away when the entire ruling party’s top brass would be behind bar,” he said.
Trinamool Congress state General Secretary Kunal Ghosh said that since Ganguly was not part of the party there is nothing political about the arrest. “The Opposition parties can say whatever they want to, [but] the TMC will never compromise with corruption,” Ghosh told PTI.
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