KOLKATA: A single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court on Tuesday asked the CBI to direct its ongoing probe in the multi-crore teachers' recruitment scam in West Bengal against another Trinamool Congress legislator, Tapas Saha, from Tehatta Assembly constituency.
Allegations about Saha's involvement in the recruitment scam were made quite some time back and the state police was also conducting a probe in the matter.
However, on Tuesday, after Calcutta High Court's single-judge bench of Justice Rajasekhar Mantha directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take over the investigation with immediate effect.
Justice Mantha also directed the state police to handover all documents concerned including the case-diary to the central agency sleuths at the earliest.
The principal allegation against Saha was that he collected a cash of Rs 16 crore for illegally arranging jobs in state-run schools to ineligible candidates.
A Public Interest Litigation in the matter was filed at the Calcutta High Court in 2018 by BJP leader and counsel of the same court Tarunjyoti Tiwari. On that PIL, the single-judge bench ordered CBI to initiate a probe against Tapas Saha.
Giving his reactions to the media persons after the order, Tiwari said that there are allegations of Saha's involvement in recruitments in various departments besides that of teaching and non-teaching staff.
"Although the state police are investigating such charges, they never took him to custody and questioned him. The state police could not give any satisfactory answer on why the chargesheet has not been placed even after a year since the investigation started. So, the bench ordered the CBI to initiate a probe against Saha," Tiwari added.