West Bengal School Service Commission has uploaded on its website the OMR sheets of over 3,000 candidates who had written a test for Group C jobs in secondary schools and whose marks, the commission told Calcutta High Court last week, had allegedly been tampered with.
Siddhartha Majumdar, chairman of the commission, said they had recommended 785 candidates for appointment from the pool of 3,115 candidates.
Will their services be terminated, like the 1,911 Group D candidates who lost their jobs after they were found to have been recruited illegally? “We will submit a report in the court on Friday. The commission will act in accordance with the court’s instruction,” Majumdar told The Telegraph.
The commission had on March 4 filed an affidavit before Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, admitting to the alleged tampering that led to a mismatch of marks. Marks in the selection test results stored on the commission’s server are not tallying with the marks stored on the hard disc of the agency that was engaged to evaluate the OMR sheets.
On Thursday, the WBSSC uploaded on its website the OMR sheets of 3,115 candidates whose scores stored on the commission’s server vary from the marks stored on the agency’s hard disc.
The commission also uploaded the OMR sheets of 362 candidates in whose cases “no difference of marks exists”.
The judge had directed the commission to upload the OMR sheets of the candidates by March 9.
Counsel for the commission had last week admitted that the officials who were at the helm of the panel in 2016 “might have tampered with the marks for appointing inefficient candidates in the vacant posts of Group C”.
The candidates whose OMR sheets were uploaded on the commission’s website on Thursday had written the job test in 2016.
“As for the 3,115 candidates, their marks stored on the WBSSC server are more in most cases than what were stored on the agency’s hard disc,” a commission official said.
“For instance, if a candidate scored 32 following the evaluation of his OMR sheet by the agency, the commission’s data base shows he scored 52.”
The commission found by scanning data that it had recommended only one candidate for appointment from the pool of 362 candidates in whose cases “no difference of marks exists”.
“That candidate might not lose his or her job,” said another commission official.
An order of Justice Gangopadhyay, uploaded on the commission’s website on September 28, said the CBI had collected three hard discs and the mother disk (original data) of the agency that evaluated the OMR sheets.
A status report filed by the CBI in the court in September said the commission had recommended 2,037 Group C candidates for appointments. Among them were 785 candidates, who stand accused of having got their jobs through manipulation of marks.