West Bengal School Service Commission on Monday evening cancelled the recommendation for 618 secondary school teachers as they have been found to have secured their jobs allegedly through manipulation of marks.
These teachers had been appointed by the state secondary education board, following the recommendation.
“It is notified that the recommendations of 618 candidates (as in annexure A) shall be taken up for cancellation in exercise of the power conferred upon the commission in terms of Rule 17 of the West Bengal School Service Commission (Selection for Appointment to the post of teachers for classes IX and X in secondary and Higher Secondary Schools) Rules, 2016,” says a notice signed by the commission’s chairman Siddhartha Majumdar.
The notice says the recommendations were “erroneously issued”.
These candidates had written the state-level selection tests in 2016.
The commission has uploaded on its website the names of the 618 candidates along with the subjects they had been recommended for and a memo of the recommendation.
An official of the commission said manipulation of marks meant that the candidate’s marks in selection test results available on the commission’s server did not tally with the responses captured on the OMR sheet details of which were retrieved from a hard disc.
The commission’s chairman on Friday said those who have a bigger mismatch of marks would have their recommendations cancelled in the first phase. These 618 candidates have a bigger mismatch of marks.
The commission announced its decision on cancellation on a day the teachers moved a division bench of Calcutta High Court against an order of a judge of the same court, who last week told the commission to terminate the service of these teachers.
The commission had recommended 800-odd teachers to the secondary board for appointment and on Monday terminated the recommendations of 618 candidates out of these 800.
Why have the remaining ones from this 800-odd been left out of the cancellation list?
A WBSSC official said the remaining 180-odd candidates have a marks mismatch of 1 or 2, and they have started manual scanning of their OMR sheets.
“The manual scanning will ensure no one is subjected to any injustice. OMR (optical mark recognition) answer scripts are scanned by the computers. By undertaking manual scanning, we want to find out whether the machine during a high-speed scan made any errors,” the official said.
“In some cases, computers read unintentional pen marks on OMR sheets. Manual scanning could find out those errors”.
The commission had on December 1 published a list of 183 candidates who had allegedly got teaching jobs in government-aided schools illegally.
On the same day, the CBI informed Justice Gangopadhyay that not 183, but 952 teachers had been appointed on the basis of fake recommendation letters.
“The list of the remaining candidates of the list of 952 will be published subsequently,” the commission’s Monday notice says.