Burdwan, Dec. 17: The district primary school council has stumbled upon a forged marksheet scam.

Eighty-two teachers, who were appointed two years ago, had got their jobs on the basis of fake marksheets, council secretary and district inspector of schools Sibaji Porel said in an FIR lodged today at the Burdwan Sadar police station.

“We had received a tip-off on one of the teachers some time back. Then, we started checking the papers relating to the appointments, the teachers’ marksheets and admit cards. We found the marksheets were fake,” said Porel. The teachers have been suspended and their salaries, provident funds and gratuity blocked.

District education department sources said since December, 2000, the 82 teachers — across 30 primary schools in Burdwan, Durgapur, Asansol and Ranigunj — had together drawn a salary of more than Rs 70 lakh.

District superintendent of police B.N. Ramesh said a probe is on. “We are trying to find out how so many teachers managed to obtain fake marksheets. We suspect an organised racket behind this and we will grill the teachers to crack it,” he added.

Council sources said a fresh recruitment drive is on since November and this time, the authorities are on the guard. “After receiving the names from the employment exchange, we scrutinised each and every document submitted by the candidates. We cleared a batch for a test later this week only after we were satisfied with the papers,” an official said.

The council chief said “a source” had first intimated it about a primary school teacher in Ranigunj who had allegedly submitted forged marksheets during recruitment.

“After the tip-off proved to be correct, I sent the entire bunch of documents submitted by the teachers in Durgapur, Burdwan and Asansol, during that particular set of recruitments in 2000, for verification. We have identified 82 teachers who had given forged documents,” he said.

Council officials said the names of the candidates had come from the district employment exchange and the Durgapur and Asansol sub-divisional employment exchanges. After written and oral tests, the candidates were asked to furnish original marksheets and admit cards.

Five months ago, the council received an anonymous complaint against the Ranigunj teacher. Subsequently, it initiated its own inquiry and sent the documents for verification to the board of secondary education, its counterpart in Patna, and the board of madarsa education.

Not long ago, 154 students were caught with forged marksheets after they took admission in a private engineering college in Durgapur. Most of the students were from the steel town and Asansol.