Calcutta High Court Appoints New Head To Probe Bengal Teachers' Job Scam

Calcutta High Court has appointed senior police officer Ashwin Shenvi as the head of the Special Investigation Team (SIT), probing the alleged teachers' job scam in West Bengal.

Mr Shenvi is a 2006-batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer from the Haryana cadre. He had joined the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2020 and was the Superintendent of Police at Jind, Haryana.

"CBI has submitted the names of Sudhanshu Khare, Michaelraj S and Ashwin Shenvi. Out of these three names, I select Mr Ashwin Shenvi, who is DIG ACB [Anti-Corruption Bureau] in CBI Chandigarh, who has vast experience in investigation of corruption cases," the single judge bench of the Calcutta High Court, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, said while issuing the order.

"Appropriate authority of CBI is ordered to send Mr Shenvi to Kolkata within seven days so that he can start functioning as SIT head," the judge said in his order.

"Without the leave of the court, Mr Shenvi cannot be transferred to any other post," the court said while dictating the order.

While holding that the teachers' recruitment scam in his view was an organised crime, the single-judge bench of Justice Gangopadhyay observed that he did not want the probe to go the Sarada or Narada way, two other financial scam investigations that have seen inordinate delays.

On Wednesday, the court had criticised the CBI for its slow progress in the probe and ordered reconstitution of the SIT.

Yesterday, Calcutta High Court was informed by the CBI that Akhilesh Singh, whom the court had appointed to head the CBI probe after reconstituting the investigation team, was no longer with the central agency and had returned to his cadre.

The court then asked the CBI to provide three DIG-rank officers' names so that a new chief of SIT could be appointed.

From the names of available officers provided by the CBI, the court chose Mr Shenvi.