A team of CBI officers visited the Salt Lake office of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education hours after a Calcutta High Court division bench upheld a single bench’s order for a probe into alleged irregularities in recruitments by the board.
Three officers reached the board’s office around 4.30pm.
Before that, CBI officers went into a huddle at their anti-corruption branch office at Nizam Palace, officers said.
“We wanted to scrutinise some data related to candidates who were declared qualified in the 2014 teachers eligibility test. Since the bulk of the information is supposed to remain in digital format, we had an expert on digital data with us in the team,” said a senior CBI officer.
The team arrived in two cars and directed the guards at the board’s CK Block office to close the gates till further orders. Sources said the officers then took the elevator to reach the office of Goutam Paul, president of the committee set up to run the board, to inform him about the raid and gain access to the server room.
“It remains vital for us to understand how the second merit list was drawn up in 2017. There appears to be a few electronic correspondences on this between some office-bearers,” the CBI officer said.
“We would also like to check the correspondences from board secretary Ratna Chakrabarty.”
In July, a CBI team searched Chakrabarty’s house. A separate team had searched the house of Manik Bhattacharya, who was removed from the post of the president of the board following a high court order.
CBI officials said some of the data collected from the board’s computers would be sent for forensic tests.
Officials collected some drives and also checked files related to appointments.