West Bengal chit fund scam: CBI tells SC it faces severe manpower crunch

NEW DELHI: The CBI on Monday told the Supreme Court that severe manpower crunch was hampering its investigations into multi-crore chit fund scams in West Bengal and sought additional hands from the state police department to assist it in the court-directed probe.

The central agency is facing a similar manpower crunch in the investigations into the Vyapam recruitment scam in Madhya Pradesh, which has nearly 2,000 accused in 105 registered cases, and plans to tell the SC that it needs more men.

Solicitor general Ranjit Kumar informed a bench of Justices T S Thakur and C Nagappan that the CBI was handicapped by shortage of manpower and was unable to conduct proper investigations into a large number of chit fund scam cases.

The CBI requested the court for a direction to the Mamata Banerjee government to spare at least 10 superintendent of police level officers and 300 junior police personnel to assist in probing the case.

Kumar said around 1,500 cases had been registered in Saradha and non-Saradha chit fund scams and the agency's work was hampered by a large number of vacancies -- around 336 posts from investigating officer level to deputy inspector general rank officers.

Kumar said 12 posts of DIGs, six SSPs, 35 SPs, 23 Additional SPs, 42 DSPs and 218 IOs were vacant in the CBI. He said there were 916 chit fund scam cases in 71 different courts and sought the SC's direction to set up three special courts in Kolkata to exclusively deal with these cases. He said there was no problem in conducting chit fund probe in Tripura and Odisha and the agency could handle that on its own.

The bench sought the West Bengal government's response by July 27 on whether it would be able to spare its police officials for the probe.

Senior advocate Nageswara Rao, appearing for the state government, said there would be no problem in providing junior rank police personnel but it would be difficult to spare SP level officers. He, however, sought time to take instruction from the state government.