The state school service commission (SSC) has announced it will hold counselling for waitlisted candidates according to their merit to fill up vacancies in Group D posts in government-aided schools that have arisen after the commission terminated “erroneous recommendations” of 1,911 candidates on Friday.
The commission has said in a notice that waitlisted candidates who would be called to attend the counselling, “if found to be related to any irregularity including manipulation in their OMRs, shall be barred from appearing in the counselling process and shall have their candidature cancelled forthwith without any notice”.
A detailed notification about the counselling process will be published on the commission’s website soon.
A commission official said since Calcutta High Court in its order disallowed the entry of the 1,911 Group D staff in their respective schools from Friday, they have to fill up the vacancies at the earliest.
Non-teaching staff who work in positions like peons and laboratory attendants are called Group-D staff.
“If we don’t fill up the vacancies immediately, the schools will encounter difficulties,” said an SSC official.
Another commission official said they had decided to bar those waitlisted candidates who stood guilty of manipulation in their OMR sheets, in compliance with a directive of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay issued on September 28.
A copy of the judge’s order posted on the commission’s website says the CBI compared the marks contained in a hard disc recovered from a Ghaziabad-based company that was hired by the commission to store data with those found in the commission’s server room.
In its report, the CBI had told the court the secondary education board had appointed 4,487 candidates following recommendations from the SSC. Out of this, manipulation of marks was detected in the case of 2,823 candidates.
These candidates wrote the third regional-level selection test held by the commission in 2016.
Manipulation means a candidate’s marks in the selection test results stored in the commission’s server did not correspond to the response captured on the OMR sheets, details of which were retrieved from the hard disc in Ghaziabad, said a commission official.
“Out of these 2,823 candidates, 1,911 had been recommended for appointment. So, we have cancelled their recommendations and will hold counselling afresh,” said the official.