Manik Bhattacharya, a TMC lawmaker, challenged the Enforcement Directorate’s decision to detain him in connection with alleged irregularities in West Bengal’s primary teacher recruitment by filing a petition with the Supreme Court on Thursday. The central investigative agency detained Dr Shanti Prasad Sinha, a former SSC adviser, and Ashok Kumar Saha, a former SSC secretary, on August 10, the day the Calcutta High Court appointed the committee’s members. According to the report that Justice R K Bag’s committee submitted to the high court, Partha Chatterjee, a senior Trinamool Congress politician, held the portfolio when the recruitment monitoring of teaching and non-teaching employees lacked legal legitimacy.
After then, the Enforcement Department (ED), which was following the money trail in the School Service Commission recruitment scandal, also detained Education Minister Chatterjee and his alleged close associate Arpita Mukherjee. Vice-Chancellor Subires Bhattacharyya of North Bengal University was detained by the CBI in 2016 as part of an investigation investigating irregularities in the employment of assistant instructors. In exchange for thousands of rupees, it is reported that a number of candidates who performed poorly on the recruitment exams were appointed as teachers while the qualified candidates were omitted entirely. Aniruddha Bose and Vikram Nath, sitting on a justices’ bench, declined to interfere with the ED’s arrest and dismissed Bhattacharya’s complaint.
The bench declared, “The application is dismissed.” After interviewing Bhattacharya all night on October 11, the ED made the arrest in relation to the alleged irregularities in the hiring of primary teachers. The West Bengal Board of Primary Education’s previous chairman, Bhattacharya, was detained for reportedly refusing to cooperate with the probe. He represents the Nadia district’s Palashipara assembly constituency.
