KOLKATA: Debanjan Deb, the 28-year-old con artist, who went around claiming to be the joint commissioner of KMC, and functioned out of a place that he passed off as a civic office, took advantage of the pandemic to strengthen the charade.
His office even sported billboards and stationery that sported the KMC insignia.
Though Deb had been calling himself an IAS officer in certain quarters for some years now, it was only in the past six months that he began to openly flaunt his “position”.
He initially organized camps to distribute sanitizers and masks with the KMC insignia printed on them.
During the recent vaccine supply shortage, Deb launched vaccine camps that targeted the poor, those who did not know about CoWin registration and weren’t too concerned about post-vaccination certificates.
Senior civic officials said Deb would not have got away with the impersonation for so long had the situation been normal.
While he had been hobnobbing with senior politicians and police officers, it was only after the pandemic that he stepped up his activity in the public domain.
“Since March 2020, everyone in the civic body has been in fire-fighting mode, battling the pandemic.
The attention has been on enforcing restrictions and containment zones, preventing crowding at markets, holding fever clinics, providing ambulance, augmenting infrastructure at KMC clinics, bolstering crematoriums, setting up vaccination centres and managing the vaccination drive.
Deb appears to have taken advantage of the civic body’s busy schedule to carry out his illicit activities,” said a KMC official.
What has become embarrassing for KMC is to justify how Deb could operate a fake civic office for months without eliciting any query or suspicion from the nearby ward coordinator’s office.
Officials have now asked cops to alerts them if any “suspicious” KMC officer attended a vaccination camp.
Kolkata Police also finds itself confronting difficult questions on how Deb managed to operate in the open without raising suspicion of local cops.
It was only by chance that actor-MP Mimi Chakraborty decided to get her vaccine at a camp organised by Deb, and when she failed to get her vaccine certificate, she alerted the police.
Both KMC and police will be hard-pressed to explain why no one realised that at 28, a person was too young to occupy a joint commissioner’s post.
Or why Deb, who claimed to be from KMC, moved around in a state I&CA department car.