The Scam in Junior College (Part XIIth)

I wrote this story, The Scam in Junior College, in 2013 and think this is the right time to post it on A Journalist Reveals. This is also one of the stories I wrote based on a real incident. Here’s the twelfth and concluding part.

The Scam in Junior College (Part XIIth)

The office assistant, Prabhakar Shinde was the in-charge of the lecturers’ attendance. Gauri had told Radha that Prabhakar kept 2 attendance registers-one was rough, where they signed every day, with the time of arrival, while the other one was fair, which was for the record to be shown to the Exam Board. Since the time she had joined the college; Radha kept her eyes open and watched Prabhakar when he was with the attendance registers. Finally, one day, she came early to college and saw him fish the rough one out of a cupboard in the principal’s room.

That was the cue she wanted. She went out of the staff room and called her brother, Inspector Kartik Srinivasan, from her cell and told him about it.

The next morning after meticulous planning, Kartik and some female and male plain clothes persons from the police department, income tax department and the higher secondary examination board waited outside the college for Radha’s signal. Radha could see Kartik, from the first-floor window of the staff room. The teaching staff slowly trickled in and signed the rough attendance register. She knew that the accounts department would be working from the morning. She went to the window and held her cell to her ear. That was their signal. Every member of Kartik’s group barged in through the gate. Kartik sent some of his men to the accounts department. Radha had already described to him the layout of the college, so it was easy for him to conduct the raid.

Radha, on her part, went and stood near the table where the rough attendance register was placed. As Kartik entered the staffroom with some men and girls from his group, first thing that Radha did was to hand over the rough attendance register to him, to everybody’s surprise.

Kartik’s announcement further shocked them all. He said, “Nobody moves from their place. This is a raid.”

Then 3-4 girls from his group went around collecting everybody’s cell phones, including the principal’s.

Mr. Bhattacharya stomped out of his cabin in anger asking, “What the hell is happening here? Who are you?”

“Mr. Bhattacharya, I am Inspector Kartik Srinivasan,” he replied, showing his identity card. “Radha is my sister. We came to investigate a scam happening here. With me are the exam board and income tax authorities!”

“Anna, you can talk to some XIth std. students. I spoke to them discretely about the fees the college had taken. They not just take the fees, but also big amounts in the name of building fund donation. Please come to the class and have a look at the benches there. Given the exorbitant amounts taken as fees and donation, the students don’t get any facilities.”

After the classrooms were photographed as evidence, Kartik and Radha came back to the staff room. There, they found the fair attendance register, which also he confiscated. On the ground floor, where the accounts department was present, they found two registers with records of the salary-rough and the fair ones. They also found the passbooks and cheque books in not only the name of the current staff, but also Gauri.

Kartik took the owner Razia Khan’s phone number from the accounts staff and called her. When she arrived, she tried to bribe them and charges of bribery were also added to the charges against her.