CBI officers on Friday continued their search operations on the premises of a city-based private company as part of their probe into alleged irregularities in a school recruitment scam, an official said.

During the ongoing search at M/s. S Basu Roy and Co. in the city’s Southern Avenue area, CBI officers seized two servers and hard disks, the official said, adding that their primary focus was on locating digital backups of the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets used in recruitment tests.

The team included six officers and two cybercrime experts. "The seized servers and hard disks will undergo forensic tests to retrieve data. Our officers are specifically searching for digital copies of the OMR sheets if they had been stored as backups," the official added.

Last week, the Calcutta High Court directed the CBI to diligently trace and retrieve the original or destroyed servers, disks, or other storage media containing scanned OMR sheets from the Teachers' Eligibility Test (TET) conducted in 2014.

The court also instructed the CBI to seek assistance from expert public or private organisations such as NIC, WIPRO, TCS, INFOSYS, etc., to determine whether the existing servers, hard disks, and computers belong to M/s. S Basu Roy and Co, to which some work for the TET examination process was allegedly outsourced, and/or the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) contains any digital traces of the scanned original OMR sheets from TET 2014.

It mandated that the costs incurred by these expert agencies would be borne by WBBPE upon demand by the CBI.

The court observed that once a digital footprint is created, it can always be retrieved.

The case is scheduled for another hearing on August 23.

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