West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) has accepted the education department’s advice to preserve OMR sheets on which teaching job aspirants write their selection tests for 10 years from the date of the test, said officials.
WBSSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar said the commission has, to begin with, decided to preserve for 10 years the OMR sheets of the forthcoming test for appointment of headmasters.
The decision comes at a time when there is controversy over destruction of OMR sheets by agencies such as the West Bengal Board of Primary Education and the West Bengal School Service Commission, a fact that emerged after disputes over appointments went to court.
Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of Calcutta High Court had last September asked the CBI to find out under which law Manik Bhattacharya, then president of the primary education board, had destroyed the OMR sheets of 12.5 lakh of the 20-odd lakh candidates who had written the 2014 Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) for government-aided primary schools.
Candidates aspiring for teaching jobs at government-aided secondary schools wrote the 2014 selection tests in 2016. The merit list was published in 2018 and the OMR sheets were destroyed in 2019.
An official in the school education department said 775 teachers whose services were terminated, in compliance with a high court order, because of alleged manipulation of marks in job tests have questioned the validity of the move in the absence of OMR sheets, which have been destroyed.
“The question was raised in the Supreme Court by counsel representing the 775 candidates. The lawyer argued that the CBI had recovered scanned images of the OMR sheets from a hard disc to establish in Calcutta High Court that there was a difference between the marks on the OMR sheets and the scores uploaded on the WBSSC server,” the official said.
“He raised questions about the credibility of the scanned OMR images. In this context, preserving the OMR sheets for 10 years is important.”
The Telegraph reported on March 24 that a lawyer representing 785 petitioners who were sacked as Group C employees in schools wondered before a division bench of the high court whether the scanned OMR sheets uploaded by the WBSSC could be accepted because, he alleged, they could have been tampered with.
The scanned images were recovered from the home of an employee of Nysa Communications, a Noida-based company that was hired by the commission to evaluate OMR sheets of tests for recruitment of teachers and non-teaching employees in schools.
“Niladri Das, vice-president of the company, was arrested earlier this week by the CBI following allegations of manipulation of OMR sheets and manipulation in the preparation of the panel by the company. So questions are bound to be asked about the authenticity of the scanned images of OMR sheets,” said another official of the department.
An official in the commission said preserving the OMR sheets of the test for recruitment of headmasters should not pose much of a problem because far fewer candidates write the exam compared with the tests for recruitment of teachers and non-teaching employees in schools.
“There are usually too many candidates for the tests for recruitment of Group C and D employees. Preserving the OMR sheets of those candidates for 10 years will require lots of space,” the official said.
The commission has decided to hand the candidates copies of their OMR sheets on the day of examination.