Kolkata, Jan 16 The Calcutta High Court on Tuesday held that appointments in state-run schools of candidates enlisted in expired panels of the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) will not be valid.
A special division bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Shabbar Rashidi, constituted to specially hear the matter related to the multi-crore cash-for-school-job cases in West Bengal following an instruction from the Supreme Court, observed that the services of the candidates being appointed from the list of an expired panel will ultimately have to be terminated.
This is applicable for both teaching staff in the secondary and higher secondary level as well as non-teaching staff in the Group C and Group D categories.
The matter will come up for hearing again on Wednesday.
Following an earlier order of the high court, the WBSSC withdrew appointment letters of many candidates on the same ground. A section of the candidates challenged this at the Supreme Court. However, the apex court returned the matter back to the Calcutta High Court, following which the special division bench was constituted to hear the matter on a fast track basis.
On Tuesday, counsel for these candidates challenged the documents provided by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the matter, following which the appointment letters were withdrawn.
He claimed that CBI sleuths did not recover any document pertaining to the panel lists from the Ghaziabad office of NYSA, the corporate entity that supplied OMR sheets to the WBSSC to be used in the written examination for recruitment of teaching and non-teaching staff in state-run schools.
"Rather those documents were recovered from the residence of a former official of NYSA. So there is every reason to the submission made by CBI in the matter," counsel argued.
At this, Justice Basak questioned whether the WBSSC itself had not retained any record in the matter. The commission representative present at the court informed that there were discrepancies in the data stored in WBSSC’s servers with that collected by the CBI from NYSA.
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