KOLKATA: The former West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee has been identified by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as the primary mastermind behind the conspiracy in its initial charge sheet in the multi-million dollar West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) scam.

The initial phase in the dispute, according to CBI sources, was to identify those who would be illegally recruited for payment as well as those qualified candidates whose names would be removed from the merit list to make room for the non-qualified ones.

The second point of contention concerned how to modify or, more precisely, raise the scores of the ineligible candidates on the commission's computer in order to include them on the merit list. "Many of these ineligible candidates had their original optical mark recognition sheets recovered by our officials, who discovered that the marks on these sheets were, on average, 50 to 53 points lower than those recorded on the commission's server. The charge sheet mentions each of these conspiracy-related elements "said a CBI official.

The work of collecting the scam's revenues was delegated to a chain of people at the same time, and each person was given responsibility for the collection in their own district. Partha Chatterjee was not only aware of the entire scheme, according to the investigative agency, but in most cases the swindle was carried out on his direct orders.

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