ED Revelations Indicate Prime Minister Modi Is Right About ‘Rate Cards’ For Jobs In Scam-Tainted Bengal

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at a rozgar mela in New Delhi on Tuesday (13 June) that dynastic parties like the Trinamool Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) have ‘rate cards’ for government jobs. 

Recent findings by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which stumbled upon another cash-for-jobs scam in Bengal’s Trinamool-run municipalities while probing a similar scam in the school education department, endorse his accusation. 

A senior ED officer told Swarajya that about 6,000 jobs of sweepers, mazdoors (labourers), clerks, peons, ambulance attendants, pump operators, sanitary assistants, drivers and helpers in 60 Trinamool Congress-run civic bodies in Bengal were "sold". 

According to an alleged ‘rate card’ that was fixed by senior functionaries of these civic bodies in collusion with senior state government officers, the post of sweeper was sold for Rs 4 lakh while that of a clerk went for Rs 6 lakh and that of a peon for Rs 5 lakh. 

The proceeds of this entire scam is estimated to be over Rs 300 crore. Senior leaders of the Trinamool Congress, who also hold posts in the municipalities under the ED’s scanner, are said to be involved in the scam. 

The ED stumbled on to this municipal recruitment scam while probing the transactions of a private company (ABS Infozone Pvt Ltd) that was awarded the contract by the school education department to design, print and evaluate OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets for candidates appearing for examinations to the posts of teachers and non-teaching staff in government-run schools. 

The company, especially its director Ayan Sil, manipulated the OMR sheets to favour undeserving candidates who paid bribes to him and other ‘collection agents’. 

The OMR sheets were manipulated by altering the answer options of successful candidates so as to disqualify them. The ED, and the CBI which is also probing the school education department scam, had discovered that many undeserving candidates who had got jobs after paying hefty bribes had submitted blank OMR sheets. 

It was while probing transactions in Ayan Sil’s bank accounts and those of his company that the ED came across deposits of large sums of money which were not the proceeds of the school education department scam. 

After incessant grilling of a couple of the accused in the school jobs scam, the ED found that a similar cash-for-jobs scam had taken place in many civic bodies as well. 

The 60-odd civic bodies, all run by the Trinamool Congress, where jobs were sold had also awarded the contract for designing, printing and evaluating OMR sheets for examinations held for the 6,000-odd jobs to Ayan Sil. 

The ED probe has revealed that Sil, who is close to many top Trinamool Congress leaders and senior state government officers, conspired with them to sell the 6,000-odd posts in the civic bodies for fixed sums of money.

Apart from Sil, other agents were also allegedly engaged in collecting bribes from undeserving candidates. “High-ranking officers of the municipal affairs department, along with top functionaries of the civic bodies who hold senior positions in a political party, conspired with Sil to orchestrate the illegal appointments in lieu of large sums of money,” the ED officer who is overseeing the probe told Swarajya. 

The municipalities where posts were sold include prominent ones like North Dum Dum, South Dum Dum, Kanchrapara, Halishahar, New Barrackpore, Kamarhati, Titagarh, Baranagar, Chinsura, Krishnanagar, Taki and Shantipur. All these municipalities are run by the Trinamool Congress and have  top Trinamool leaders, including MLAs, as their chairpersons. 

This scam is said to have started in 2014. The CBI, which was requested by the ED to launch a parallel probe into the jobs scam in the civic bodies, conducted raids in multiple civic bodies and also the head office of the municipal affairs department that is headed by Firhad Hakim, a close confidante of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee last Wednesday (7 June). 

The CBI is learnt to have collected crucial evidence, including names of agents who collected bribes, and the list of people who got jobs in civic bodies after paying hefty sums of money, during the raids. 

The documents in CBI’s possession contain detailed profiles of the candidates who paid bribes, the specific sums of money they paid and the agents they paid the bribes to.

The ED is working in tandem with the CBI that has shared the evidence collected during last Wednesday’s raids. The ED officer told Swarajya that irrefutable evidence of kickbacks from the scam being collected by chairpersons of several municipalities and senior state government officials has been gathered.

Many Trinamool leaders and functionaries, including former education minister Partha Chatterjee, were arrested for receiving kickbacks from the school jobs recruitment scam.

Similarly, a number of Trinamool Congress functionaries are expected to be arrested for their involvement in the municipal bodies recruitment scam. 

The CBI and ED probes have revealed that the recruitment scams in schools and municipalities were sophisticated rackets where various posts were sold for specific sums of money and the bribes collected in a very organised manner.