Kolkata, 3 September (H.S.):

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday strongly opposed the bail plea of former West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee and several co-accused in the multi-crore teachers’ recruitment scam. The matter came up for hearing before the special CBI court in Alipore, where multiple accused, including Chatterjee, Samarjit Acharya, and Parna Basu, filed applications seeking bail. During the proceedings, Chatterjee’s former personal secretary, Sukanta Acharya, also surrendered before the court.

The CBI argued that each case related to the scam must be treated independently and cannot be linked to one another. The agency further submitted that corruption of this nature has far-reaching consequences, as it undermines public trust and damages the credibility of the education system. On these grounds, the CBI firmly opposed granting bail to the accused.

It is worth recalling that in 2022, the CBI filed its first chargesheet just 51 days after initiating the probe into the SSC Group-C recruitment scam. The chargesheet named Partha Chatterjee and Samarjit Acharya, along with several others, including former West Bengal Board of Secondary Education advisor Shantiprasad Sinha, former board chairman Soumitra Sarkar, Ashok Kumar Saha, ad-hoc committee chairman Kalyanmoy Gangopadhyay, as well as illegally appointed candidates Deepankar Ghosh, Subrata Khan, Akshay Mani, and Idris Ali Molla, among others.

Hindusthan Samachar / Satya Prakash Singh