ANATOMY OF A MONEY HEIST

Zoom in on Bengal's teacher recruitment scam, and what you see is a far-flung web of bribery and deceit woven by a band of corrupt officials and their eager clients

- ROMITA DATTA

For the past 500 days, a motley group of young men and women in their late 20s and early 30s have sat together in Kolkata's Dharmatala area, the busy office-cum-commercial hub, holding handwritten placards with words like: "We want jobs, we want justice." They have faced police batons and humiliation, weathered the scorching summer and heavy rains, and even lost four of their compatriots. Yet, they have stood their ground, unwilling to budge an inch until the 6,000 men and women who made it to the merit list of the State Level Selection Test (SLST), conducted by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) to recruit teachers for class IX to class XII, get jobs. There is little sloganeering, but their resolute, dogged silence has led to the unearthing of one of the biggest scams in West Bengal's history. In their fight against a government machinery that allegedly sold jobs for cash, their only ray of hope is an unrelenting judge of the Calcutta High Court-Justice Abhijit Ganguly.

The long legal battle is bearing fruit: the CBI has launched a probe into the irregularities, allegedly carried out at the behest of now-ousted minister and Trinamool Congress heavyweight Partha Chatterjee, who held the education portfolio till 2019. In a parallel probe, the Enforcement Directorate recovered Rs 50 crore in cash from the homes of 36-year-old actress Arpita Mukherjee, a close aide of Chatterjee. Both Chatterjee and Arpita have been arrested, forcing an embarrassed chief minister Mamata Banerjee to sack Chatterjee from her cabinet and strip him of all party positions. In a further damage control exercise, she brought in nine new ministers in a cabinet reshuffle on August 3-all hand-picked by TMC general secretary and party second-in-command Abhishek Banerjee.