Kolkata: With the first Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in West Bengal having already taken charge with Suvendu Adhikari as the first BJP Chief Minister, Siddhartha Majumdar, the chairman of the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC), an autonomous body under the State Education Department, has tendered his resignation on Tuesday.
The WBSSC has faced scrutiny due to the multi-crore cash-for-school job scandal that occurred during the previous Trinamool Congress government.
Simultaneously, Ramanuj Gangopadhyay, the current president of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE), which has also been implicated in the school job scandal, along with its former president Kalyanmoy Gangopadhyay, who has spent several days in jail due to the case, submitted his resignation on Tuesday.
The two resignations come just a day after the new state government issued an order terminating the tenures of nominated directors, members and chairpersons of different boards, organisations, non-statutory bodies and public sector undertakings under various state government departments.
Majumdar was appointed as the WBSSC chairman in 2022 by the previous Mamata Banerjee-led state cabinet. Although he was supposed to retire in January this year, the previous cabinet gave him an extension. He has spent almost four years and four months in that chair.
The resignations of both Majumdar and Gangopadhyay have reached the office of the State Education Secretary, confirmed a departmental insider.
During the previous Trinamool Congress regime, the highest number of corruption cases were in relation to the State Education Department. The then State Education Minister and the former Trinamool Congress secretary general, Partha Chatterjee, is currently on bail after spending over three years behind bars. He was arrested in July 2022 by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the school job case. Trinamool Congress denied him the re-nomination this time.
Besides Chatterjee, heads of several boards and autonomous bodies attached to the State Education Department were also arrested either by the ED or the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), with the two central agencies running parallel probes in the matter.
“That is why the newly-formed BJP government in the state is taking several actions in the department to bring transparency in the education sector,” said a source.
(IANS)
