Justice Rajasekhar Mantha of Calcutta High Court on Tuesday asked the CBI to produce by Friday the hard disk containing data related to the results of the 2014 Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) for recruiting teachers in state-aided primary
schools.

The judge had earlier asked the CBI counsel to ask his client to trace the hard disk on which the digital OMR sheets had been preserved.

The hearing of the case relating to alleged irregularities in the primary teachers’ recruitment based on the 2014 TET came up after a gap of several months.

In this case, former education minister Partha Chatterjee, former primary education board chairman and Trinamool Congress MLA Manik Bhattacharya, Trinamool MLA Jeevan Saha and several others have been in custody for over a year.

In April, Justice Mantha said he would be forced to cancel all appointments based on the 2014 TET if the CBI failed to retrieve data from the
OMR sheets.

“The digital records (of the OMR sheets) cannot be erased easily. Even if the records get erased, there are ways to retrieve the data. If the data cannot be retrieved by the CBI, the court would be forced to cancel the entire appointment process...,” the judge had then said.

The primary education board had earlier said that since the CBI took custody of the digital OMR sheets, the board would not be able to present them in court.

The CBI counsel had, however, said that the records were with the board.

At this, the court had directed the CBI to retrieve the “original data”.

The board had earlier declared that it was not possible to physically store all hard copies of the OMR sheets because of their volume over the years.

The scanned copies were preserved for future reference but the original hard copies had been disposed of.

Justice Mantha on Tuesday said that if the board could produce the scanned OMR sheets — which had been preserved in a hard disk — there must have been at least one hard disk from where these scanned OMR sheets had been obtained.

The CBI was again asked to trace this hard disk.

Justice Mantha said: “Even if the hard disk is destroyed, the CBI should incorporate the issue in its investigation.”

The case will be heard again on Friday.