Don’t take help from MP staff to probe Vyapam: SC to CBI

R Sedhuraman

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Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, July 31

The Supreme Court today rejected CBI’s plea for utilising the services of Madhya Pradesh officials to probe the Vyapam scam in the state and asked the agency to take over all the 185 cases from the special investigation team (SIT) and the special task force (STF) within three weeks and handle these on its own.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice HL Dattu firmly said “no, no” when Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar pleaded for involving MP officials in the probe to overcome the problem of acute manpower shortage in the CBI due to about 750 vacancies at various levels — DIG, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), SP and constable.

The Bench asked the CBI provide details of the vacancies so that it could ask the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to fill up all the posts. As no law officer representing DoPT was present in the court today, it said Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi should ensure that DoPT’s counsel appeared at the next hearing on August 24.

The Bench had directed the CBI on July 9 to conduct the investigations and handle cases relating to the scam in recruitments for government jobs and admissions to professional courses such as medicine and engineering through Vyapam, a statutory body of the state.

The Bench had asked the SIT and STF that were conducting the probe and filing chargesheets to hand over the relevant files and court cases to the CBI. It had passed the order on a batch of PILs contending that a CBI probe was necessary to bring all the culprits to book as the SIT and STF personnel were drawn from the state police and as such were not in a position to proceed against top politicians and bureaucrats involved in the scam.

The SC also directed the CBI to engage adequate number of counsel to handle all Vyapam cases in the trial court.