New twist in Rs 1 crore UP teacher scam, ‘real culprit’ Anamika Shukla says she’s jobless

The alleged scam came to light last week, three months after the state began a probe into media reports about one teacher drawing salaries from multiple govt schools.

Students in a classroom in India | Representational image | Max Pixel

Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh teacher racket that allegedly saw as many as 25 teachers get a job at government schools on the basis of one person’s testimonials has taken a fresh turn. 

A woman spoke to the media Tuesday and claimed to be the science teacher at the centre of the scam, Anamika Shukla, whose documents allegedly facilitated the fraudulent recruitment. 

Speaking out after the local media began to refer to the racket as the “Anamika Shukla scam”, the woman claimed her documents had been misused by others, and said she was jobless.

The claims came after police in Uttar Pradesh arrested 11 suspects and filed nine FIRs in different districts affected by the scam. The suspects arrested include a teacher who allegedly gained proxy appointment in the state’s Kasturba Gandhi chain of girls’ schools on the basis of Shukla’s documents. 

In a press conference earlier Tuesday, UP Primary Education Minister Satish Dwivedi had claimed the “real culprit Anamika Shukla” was yet to be arrested. Police is searching for her, he added.

The alleged scam came to light last week, three months after the state government began an investigation into local media reports about one teacher drawing salaries from multiple government schools. 

The 25 recruitments spanned different districts of the state, from Aligarh to Prayagraj and Baghpat, and involved branches of the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs) for girls. Sources in the state’s basic education department had told ThePrint earlier that the racket had led to the disbursal of as much as Rs 1 crore in emoluments over the 13 months that it went undetected.

‘Investigation continues’

Speaking to the media in Gonda Tuesday, the woman who claimed to be Shukla said she was unemployed. She said her documents had been misused by other people to get jobs at the Kasturba Gandhi chain of schools, and urged police action against the perpetrators. 

“I read in a newspaper that someone holds a job in my name at 25 Kasturba Gandhi girls schools. The media is highlighting me as a fraudster, so I decided to visit the office of the local BSA (basic shiksha adhikari, an official of the state’s basic education department) and police station to lodge a complaint,” she said. 

Dr Indrajeet Prajapati, the BSA for Gonda district, confirmed to ThePrint that a woman who claimed to be Anamika Shukla did visit his office Tuesday. 

According to Prajapati, a woman named Shukla had applied for a job as a science teacher at the KGBV three years ago, but never attended the counselling session. She took back her documents too, he said. “Now, she is claiming that someone used her documents to get the job,” he added. 

The BSA said there was a chance that some “fraudsters are involved in the recruitment process”. “This should be investigated by police,” he added, saying he had sent a report on the incident to the UP director general of school education.

Director General of School Education Vijay Kiran Anand said he knew about the Gonda episode, adding that their investigation is still underway. “We can’t draw any conclusion yet, we have to wait for some more more days.”  

Asked about the details of the scam, he said it appeared that different people had taught at 25 branches of the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas under the “proxy name of Anamika Shukla”. 

Nine FIRs lodged

Since the scam came to light last Friday, police have filed nine FIRs in as many districts and made 11 arrests in the case. The arrests include a teacher from Kasganj, who is believed to be one of the people who fraudulently secured a job with Shukla’s papers. 

She has been identified as Supriya Singh and the woman is said to have been working at the KGBV branch in Baghpat. Police are now investigating her eligibility for the job she secured.

Singh was arrested Saturday. She was produced before a district court in Kasganj Monday and remanded in judicial custody judicial custody. 

Another such teacher, a woman named Reena Singh believed to have been teaching in Prayagraj, has also been identified but is yet to be arrested.

Several police teams, it is learnt, have fanned out across the state to further investigate the case.