Bengal tab grant for students lands up in mule accounts

KOLKATA After the irregularities in the school and municipal recruitments as well as fund embezzlement in the public distribution system (PDS), a fresh scam has come to light in West Bengal.

- SUPROTIM MUKHERJEE

Hundreds of students studying in Classes 11 and 12 in government schools have discovered that a promised grant of Rs 10,000 for buying tablets and smartphones has made its way to others' accounts.

Students from at least 15 districts of West Bengal, including Kolkata, have been affected.

As part of the "Taruner Swapno" project, the tablet fund scheme was launched by the Mamata Banerjee government to disburse a sum of Rs 10,000 to the bank accounts of students in Class 11 and 12 to buy smartphones and tablets.

Banerjee had announced the first tablet scheme on 3 December 2020, initially naming it Tablet Scheme 2021, months before the Assembly elections.

At the time, Opposition voices had said that this was a blatant attempt to create another vote bank.

The Mamata Banerjee government had said that the grant would help students participate in online classes in the time of Covid.

The high-profile financial fraud is unique in the sense that money was siphoned off despite being a "direct benefit scheme", where funds are transferred directly to the bank accounts of beneficiaries, eliminating the "middle man".

In the financial year 202425, the West Bengal government has allocated about Rs 900 crore for the scheme.

As per the norms, the schools were supposed to upload details of their eligible students on to a state government portal. The school authorities needed to log into the portal using the user ID of the school to create the database. Police said that, as per preliminary in vestigation, the scammers managed to hack the user IDs and passwords of the targeted schools and replaced their bank accounts with those of the students.