Kolkata, April 3 With the Supreme Court on Thursday upholding the Calcutta High Court last year order cancelling the entire panel of appointments in teaching and non-teaching categories made by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) in 2016, prolonged legal proceedings discourses in the matter in both courts have pinpointed several lapses on part of the WBSSC that made the process of segregation between "genuine" and "ineligible" candidates virtually impossible.
The apex court’s division bench of Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar on Tuesday also accepted the observation by the Calcutta High Court’s division bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Shabbar Rashidi in April last year that it was impossible to segregate the genuine candidates from those ineligible ones getting jobs paying money.
As was evident during the proceedings in the two courts, the major lapse was in relation to the preservation of the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets used in written examination and retaining their scanned copies.
Prior to 2016, the commission followed the practice of retaining the OMR sheets used in written examinations for three years. During the proceedings in the two courts, it was revealed that the OMR sheets for the panel of 2016 were destroyed just a year after the written examination.
In addition to that, as became evident during the prolonged legal proceedings, even the scanned copies of the destroyed IMR sheets for the 2016 panel were not retained by the Commission.
Legal experts have pointed out that had the OMR sheets been preserved or even at least their scanned copies had been maintained, the segregation between the “genuine” and ‘ineligible’ candidates could have been done easily.
That is exactly where the role of the WBSSC and the state Education Department in the matter has become questionable with the opposition parties claiming that “genuine” candidates will now have to suffer because of the attempts by the state government and the ruling Trinamool Congress to protect the jobs of the ineligible candidates who secured their appointments by paying money.
Another point where the state government had come under the scathing attack of the opposition parties again and again was the decision to create supernumerary posts. The opposition parties alleged that the decision was taken not to accommodate the "genuine" candidates but to protect the jobs of "ineligible" ones.
Even the Calcutta High Court, at one point in time, questioned the justification behind the creation of such posts and also directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to bring this matter within the ambit of the agency’s investigation of the multi-crore cash-for-school job case.
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