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By Rajesh Saha: Labourers deployed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials to fish out two mobile phones of TMC MLA Jiban Krishna Saha, which he threw into a pond, staged a protest demanding their dues in West Bengal’s Murshidabad on Wednesday. In response, the central agency has assured that all the labourers will soon be reimbursed, a source in CBI told India Today.
On April 14, the CBI conducted a raid at TMC MLA Jiban Krishna Saha’s residence in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district in connection with the teachers’ recruitment scam. The agency sleuths seized two of his mobile phones. However, the TMC MLA snatched the phones from the CBI officers and threw them into a pond behind his residence.
The CBI officials, who believed the phones contained crucial evidence related to the case, pressed into service three motor pumps to drain water from the pond. The water was pumped out by the next day and a few labourers were deployed to find the phones. By now, a JCB machine and two tractors were also pressed into service to dig out the mud, from where the labourers had to look for the phones.
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After nearly two days of searches, the CBI recovered one of the phones on April 17 and left with Jiban Krishna Saha for Kolkata, where he was produced before a court and remanded in four days’ CBI custody. Meanwhile, one team of the central probe agency stayed back in Murshidabad and found the second mobile phone within a few hours after the first team left.
Though the 66-hour search operation concluded on Monday, labourers were allegedly not paid their wages due to which they staged a protest on Wednesday.
Dilwar Sheikh, a local TMC leader, said, “CBI officers asked one person named Sukumar Pramanik to arrange a JCB and a tractor. Pramanik requested me to arrange the equipment on priority. I promised CBI to co-operate with their investigation in every way possible and arranged the tractors and JCB which were deployed at some other site for another project.”
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“Our labourers continued working in extreme heat until both the mobile phones were recovered. However, once the search operation concluded, the CBI team left for Kolkata without paying the labourers,” said Dilwar Sheikh.
A source in the TMC said one JCB and two tractors were brought from the next village, Harimati, while 15 of the 28 labourers deployed for the search operation had to be called from Kalyanpur village. The CBI officials had allegedly promised to pay each labourer Rs 500.
The TMC source told the reporter that the central agency had to pay Rs 20,000 for the equipment used in the search operation and Rs 15,500 to the labourers. In total, the agency had to pay Rs 35,500 for the equipment and labour used for the search operation.
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Dilwar Sheikh claimed that when the laborers staged a protest on Wednesday seeking their dues, an amount of Rs 9,000 was disbursed. “Till now, the CBI has not asked us about the due payment. We don’t know when they will call us and pay the entire amount,” he said.
When India Today approached CBI, a source in the central probe agency said, “The dues of the workers will be cleared very soon. Somehow, the officers couldn’t pay the amount… We have to go through a proper process to pay anyone. In this case, we have already taken their bank account numbers and the dues will be cleared as soon as possible.”
With inputs from Gopal Thakur from Murshidabad
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