New Delhi : Even as the parliamentary storm over the Vyapam scam continued and Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had an official meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Supreme Court told the Central Bureau of Investigation to inform it in three weeks about taking over the investigation of maximum number of cases out of 185 arising from the admission cum recruitment scam.
A three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice H L Dattu, justices Amitava Roy and Arun Mishra told the solicitor general Ranjit Kumar that the three week period should be sufficient for the CBI to take over the investigations from the Special Task Force (STF) and the Special Investigation team (SIT).
“You should be in a position to tell us we (CBI) have taken up the maximum number of cases,” the bench said. The bench also said that the CBI should be in a position to complete the task of appointing lawyers to prosecute the offenders in various special CBI courts in Madhya Pradesh within six weeks.
The court was told that there are all together 185 cases and charge sheets have been filed in 78 of them and the priority of the CBI is to take over those cases in which the investigation was underway. It was informed that 55 cases are being examined by the STF/SIT and out of the remaining 130 cases, charge sheets have been filed in 49; out of the 81 which are under probe, 73 are related to cheating by candidates in examination, which the CBI was inclined to take up at a later stage.
The Chouhan-Modi meeting was officially said to be related to the Niti Aayog. “The meeting was called to discuss the report of NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog’s sub-committee, headed by Chouhan,” said an official of the state government. But there were other issues like the expansion of the state cabinet and the forthcoming Simhastha at Ujjain.
