Jiban Krishna Saha, who is a sitting legislator from the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in Burwan, Murshidabad district, was arrested on Monday by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for his alleged involvement in the West Bengal school education department’s bribe-for-job scam. The federal agency had been questioning Saha and searching his house since Friday, which was the longest raid in the investigation so far.
Saha is the third TMC MLA to be arrested in connection with the scam, which involved bribes for non-teaching staff (Group C and D) and teaching staff’s appointments by the West Bengal School Service Commission and West Bengal Board of Secondary Education between 2014 and 2021. The appointees allegedly paid bribes ranging from INR 5-15 lakh to get jobs after failing the selection tests.
The CBI officials found documents related to hundreds of people who allegedly paid bribes for school jobs in five bags that were hidden in bushes behind Saha’s house. The documents affixed with photographs of aspiring candidates who had allegedly paid bribes were recovered, and the bribe collected runs into multiple crores. Saha is being brought to Kolkata and is likely to be produced in court later in the day.
When the CBI team arrived at his residence on Friday morning, Saha allegedly threw his two mobile phones into an adjacent pond. The agency used three pumps for around 48 hours to drain the pond and brought in an earth mover on Sunday afternoon to dig out the sludge since hired laborers could only find one phone after the water was fully drained.
The investigation into the scam began after Calcutta high court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay ordered the CBI to probe the appointments of non-teaching staff and teaching staff. The CBI probe found the involvement of TMC leaders, including former education minister Partha Chatterjee and his aide Arpita Mukherjee, who were arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in July 2022. In its first charge sheet filed on September 19, the ED said it traced cash, jewelry, and immovable property worth INR 103.10 crore linked to the duo.
TMC MLA from Nadia district and former president of the primary education board, Manik Bhattacharya, was arrested by the ED on October 11 last year, and he is also in judicial custody and has been named as a key accused in the ED’s second charge sheet.
The CBI has recently brought in seven officers from other states to speed up the probe. On Friday, the CBI raided six locations in Bengal, including Saha’s home in Murshidabad. The agency searched a construction site at New Town on the eastern outskirts of Kolkata and some places in Birbhum district as well. The search operations started hours before Union home minister Amit Shah arrived in Bengal to launch the BJP’s Lok Sabha campaign in the state. He addressed a rally at Siuri town in Birbhum district.
