School jobs case: WBSSC released 'truncated' tainted candidates list, more names may surface, legal brains

Kolkata, Sep 2 The list of tainted candidates released by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) in connection with the school jobs case was "truncated", and many other names may surface in the coming days, according to legal brains.

They also feel that the list of just 1,806 tainted candidates, which had already been made public by the commission last week, had been published to "conceal rather than reveal".

According to the former judge of the Calcutta High Court and the BJP Lok Sabha member from Tamluk constituency in East Midnapore district of West Bengal, Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who had been dealing with the different cases on the multi-crore cash-for-school job matter in West Bengal since the beginning as the-then judge of Calcutta High Court, feel that the number of tainted candidates would be no less than 6,000.

"According to him, the number of tainted candidates, as revealed by WBSSC last week, could not be as low as 1,806, since there were a total of four categories of tainted candidates getting jobs after paying money.

According to him, the first category of tainted candidates includes those who got jobs even without appearing for the written examination.

The second category of talented candidates, he said, consists of those who got jobs after submitting blank answer sheets in the written examination.

The third category, he added, includes those whose optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets were tampered with to increase their secured marks. And finally, the fourth category of tainted candidates includes those who were recruited from expired panels.

Hence, he added, if all the tainted candidates under these four categories are combined, the total number of tainted candidates will be nothing less than 6,000.

Senior advocate and CPI(M) Rajya Sabha member, Bikas Ranjan Bhattacharya, who had long been fighting several legal battles in the matter, also feels that the total of possible tainted candidates as quoted by Gangopadhyay sounded quite accurate.

"As far as my experience is concerned, because of my long association with similar cases, the total number of tainted candidates would be nothing less than 6,000, and if not more. In my opinion, the only aim of the state government and the commission is to shield as many tainted candidates as possible, and to do that, they have been adopting different tricks at different times, with the last list of just 1,806 tainted candidates," said Bhattacharya.

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