Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of Calcutta High Court on Tuesday refused to accept the "OMR sheet" evidence that the CBI presented as part of the investigation into the alleged corruption in school recruitments and said the documents were merely typed OMR sheets and not the original ones.
Justice Gangopadhyay also issued an order asking Ashwin Shenvi, DIG, CBI, who heads the special investigation team (SIT) that is probing the alleged irregularities, to appear in his court at 2pm on September 27 and clarify the reason for his team's failure to conduct a proper probe.
The team of CBI officers that is investigating the alleged irregularities has been appointed by the high court.
"It seems the SIT has miserably failed in conducting the probe into the scam. Shenvi, leader of the team, is directed to appear before this Court and clarify why his team has failed to conduct the probe properly," the order said.
The court on Tuesday also accused "a section of the employees of the Primary School Education board" of having a nexus with their former boss, Manik Bhattacharya, and said they were still shielding the arrested MLA.
"These employees have been trying to shield Bhattacharya's crime and have not been cooperating with the CBI in its probe into the primary teacher recruitment scam case," the court said.
"For a long period, the board (primary school education board) was the zamindari (read personal property) of Manik Bhattacharya. Some of his followers are still working on the board. They are now trying to mislead the investigation and placing fake documents before investigators," the judge said.
On Monday, the judge had come down on the CBI investigators for their alleged failure to find the guilty. He had wondered whether the sleuths had an alliance with Bhattacharya and slammed the central agency for not conducting a "proper probe" against him.
On Tuesday, as asked by the court, the CBI placed the OMR sheets that were purportedly seized. But Justice Gangopadhyay said those were not the original OMR sheets from the 2014 teachers' eligibility test, which were recovered from a Ghaziabad company.
Justice Gangopadhyay called an expert — Kallol Chatterjee — before the court and sought his opinion on the OMR sheets presented in the court. After discussing with Chatterjee, the judge said: "It is merely a typed copy."
The CBI counsel had claimed that Bhattacharya had burnt the original OMR sheets and there was no evidence of the burning.
The judge declined to believe this and said: "There must be some witnesses to the incident who are still trying to shield Bhattacharya."