West Bengal Teachers' scam: 40 more illegal recruits identified, names to be published soon

Kolkata, Dec 6 (IANS) West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) on Tuesday submitted to the Calcutta High Court 40 additional names who were "wrongly recommended" for teachers` appointment for 9th and 10th standards in state-run schools.

Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay has directed WBSSC to publish the names of these 40 candidates on the website of the Commission by Tuesday evening only.

These 40 names are in addition to the 83 names already published by the Commission as "wrongly recommended".

On Tuesday, the Commission`s counsel submitted the 40 new "wrongly recommended" names out of which, 20 are in the final recruitment list and 20 are in the waiting list.

Justice Gangopadhyay expressed surprise over the manner in which the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets of these 40 candidates were manipulated to illegally accommodate them in the final recruitment and waiting lists.

Of the 20 candidates in the final recruitment list, 10 secured "zero" in the written examinations as per the hard-disc, which was later increased to "53" in the Commission`s server. In the case of the other 10 candidates in the final recruitment list, their numbers between "1 and 2" were increased to between "51 and 52" in the Commission`s server.

Similar manipulations were made in the numbers of the 20 candidates in the waiting list which were submitted to the court on Tuesday by WBSSC`s counsel. The numbers of these candidates in the waiting list from "9 and 10" as per the hard-discs were increased to between "49 and 49" in the Commission`s server.

"Such manipulations cannot be the handiwork of ghosts. Surely some people within WBSSC are involved with it," Justice Gangopadhyay observed.

Meanwhile, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is supposed to submit its own list of "wrongly recommended" candidates on Wednesday. Now, it is to be seen what the figure quoted by CBI will vary with that quoted by WBSSC or not.

On Monday, CBI`s deputy inspector general of police and head of the special investigation team (SIT) probing the multi-crore teachers` recruitment scam in West Bengal, Ashwin Senvi informed the court that total 21,000 candidates were recruited illegally in all categories of WBSSC and more than 9,000 OMR sheets were tampered with.

He also said that in November 2021, the investigation began on the basis of allegations of rank-jumping.

"But with the recovery of hard-discs, the issue of tampering with the OMR sheets has come to the forefront," Senvi added.

(The above article is sourced from news agency IANS. Zeenews.com has made no editorial changes to the article. News agency IANS is solely responsible for the contents of the article)