Kolkata, Sep 11 (IANS) The process of framing charges against a total of 21 accused individuals in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)-registered cases in the alleged multi-crore West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) scam, was completed at a special CBI court here on Thursday.

The three names among the 21 accused in the case are the former West Bengal education minister and ex-Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee, former West Bengal minister of state in charge of school education Paresh Chandra Adhikary, and his daughter Ankita Adhikary.

All three of them have filed exemption petitions with the plea for being exempted from the charges under which they had been framed.

The major names in the list of the accused persons include former West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) Kalyanmoy Gangopadhyay, former WBSSC chairman, Subiresh Bhattacharya, former head of WBSSC screening committee, Santa Prasad Singh, former WBSSC secretary, Ashok Saha, and former WBSSC staff Samarjit Acharya and Parna Basu, among others.

Niladri Das and Pankaj Bansal, both associates of NYSA, the private agency outsourced by the commission to supply and preserve optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets used for the written examination for recruitment, were also named as accused.

The accused have been framed under various sections, including criminal conspiracy, causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen an offender, cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property, forgery, and using forged documents as genuine ones, among others.

With the process of framing of charges in the matter being completed, the trial process in the matter will start now, which will be followed first by conviction and thereafter by sentencing.

Among those against whom the framing of charges has been completed, Partha Chatterjee is the one who had been behind the bars for his involvement in the school-job case for the longest period.

He was arrested in July 2022 from his residence by the officials of the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which had been conducting a parallel probe in the school job cases. Later, he was also shown as arrested by the CBI.

Recently, he was granted bails by different courts in almost all the cases registered against him both by CBI and ED, in the alleged WBSSC scam. Yet, he could not manage himself out of judicial custody, because of separate cases registered against him relating to irregularities in the recruitment of primary teachers appointed by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE).

–IANS

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