Students in Classes 11 and 12 in government schools discovered that a promised grant of Rs 10,000 for buying tablets and smartphones has made its way to others’ accounts.
KOLKATA: After the irregularities in the school and municipal recruitments as well as fund embezzlement in the public distribution system (PDS), a fresh scam has come to light in West Bengal. Hundreds of students studying in Classes 11 and 12 in government schools have discovered that a promised grant of Rs 10,000 for buying tablets and smartphones has made its way to others’ accounts. Students from at least 15 districts of West Bengal, including Kolkata, have been affected.
As part of the “Taruner Swapno” project, the tablet fund scheme was launched by the Mamata Banerjee government to disburse a sum of Rs 10,000 to the bank accounts of students in Class 11 and 12 to buy smartphones and tablets. Banerjee had announced the first tablet scheme on 3 December 2020, initially naming it Tablet Scheme 2021, months before the Assembly elections.
At the time, Opposition voices had said that this was a blatant attempt to create another vote bank. The Mamata Banerjee government had said that the grant would help students participate in online classes in the time of Covid.
The high-profile financial fraud is unique in the sense that money was siphoned off despite being a “direct benefit scheme”, where funds are transferred directly to the bank accounts of beneficiaries, eliminating the “middle man”.
In the financial year 2024-25, the West Bengal government has allocated about Rs 900 crore for the scheme.
As per the norms, the schools were supposed to upload details of their eligible students on to a state government portal. The school authorities needed to log into the portal using the user ID of the school to create the database. Police said that, as per preliminary investigation, the scammers managed to hack the user IDs and passwords of the targeted schools and replaced their bank accounts with those of the students.
While the government has claimed that the account numbers of the students were replaced with those of the scamsters at the school-level itself, leading to protests from head masters, Education Minister Bratya Basu said that the Education Department portal had been hacked and false details uploaded.
An officer of Kolkata Police said a preliminary inquiry revealed that the fraudsters had hired multiple mule accounts. Account holders were given money between Rs 300 and Rs 5,000 to grant access to their bank accounts. Mule accounts are bank accounts that facilitate illegal transactions by receiving and transferring funds from unlawful activities, with or without the complicity.
A probe into the complaints lodged in Kolkata found that, in most cases, the money went into the bank accounts of residents of Chopra, Islampur and nearby areas. Kolkata Police have formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to look into the allegations.
The investigation has revealed that there have been instances of targeting the “Taruner Swapno” portal with the involvement of cyber cafes across the scam. In several cases the funds have been transferred to bank accounts outside the state.
While the state government insists that only a minuscule percentage of students have been affected, and has assured that they will be sent funds immediately, the state Opposition has started getting vocal at “another scam”.
Said political observer Biswanath Chakraborty: “The ‘tablet fraud’ comes at a time when the state government is facing allegations of irregularities in the school and municipal recruitments as well as fund embezzlement in the public distribution system (PDS). Former Education Minister Partha Chatterjee and former Food and Supplies Minister Jyotipriya Mullick are behind bars for alleged involvement in school recruitment and PDS frauds.”
Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari said there is not a scheme in West Bengal where fraud has not been executed by the supporters of the ruling party.
“This is a scam done by junior officers of the state government and local level Trinamool leaders. After all, when they see that the Chief Minister, her ministers and her family have minted crores from so many scams, they feel that they can also make some money. If they can mint crores, why should we not make lakhs”, Adhikari told The Sunday Guardian.
Most of the mule accounts are located in certain areas of north Bengal, the police added. Most of the bank accounts where the money has landed are in Chopra, Islampur, Kishanganj and other places in north Bengal. The money has been withdrawn through ATMs within one to two hours of the transfer, said an investigator.
Two persons from Chopra in North Dinajpur have been arrested in connection with the case. One of them is the son of a Trinamool leader and the police unearthed letterheads and rubber stamps of the gram panchayat from his possession.
According to the police, the scam is the handiwork of one person, the others are just accomplices. The investigators are also trying to figure out how the data of students, which was collected by the schools and sent to the office of the district inspector from there, got compromised.
South Bengal Additional Director General Supratim Sarkar said the investigation has revealed the involvement of cybercriminal gangs operating across multiple states, including Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand.
“We found that interstate gangs were behind this fraud. Some of the arrested individuals admitted to past scams, including misuse of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes and the national scholarship portal,” Sarkar said.
According to Sarkar, the fraud was perpetrated by cybercriminals operating from multiple states, including Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand.
He added that as per the data collected from the state Education Department, a total of 1,911 of the 16 lakh beneficiaries were cheated as a result of the cyber fraud.
“This is about 0.1% of the total, though even a single case is one too many. So far, 93 such cases have been reported in the state. We have 11 individuals, of whom three were arrested from East Midnapore district in the last 24 hours. Two of them are residents of Malda and one is from Chopra in North Dinajpur district,” Sarkar said at a press conference at the West Bengal Police headquarters on Friday.
“We are trying to find out whether these miscreants manipulated the system, or there was any involvement of people at the ground-level, or whether someone acted as a mole in the system to help the fraudsters,” Sarkar said.
Meanwhile, sources from the state police said an investigation is underway to ascertain if employees within the Education Department had provided data regarding beneficiaries to the fraudsters.
Opposition leaders alleged that the state was trying to downplay the scam.
In damage-control mode, Mamata Banerjee also confirmed that students who did not receive the money owing to the cyber fraud would do so shortly. “As I have been informed, some of them have already received the money,” she said.
She said her administration is “strong, rough and tough” and would not tolerate such “scams”, adding that her government has formed a special team to probe the issue.
Banerjee claimed that such cyber scams have taken place in other states as well, and West Bengal Police was the first to act on it. “My administration is rough and tough in such cases,” she said.