The high court has asked the state primary education board to produce the digitised OMR sheet of a candidate who wrote the teachers’ eligibility test (TET) 2017 after the candidate claimed that the hard copy of the OMR sheet, which the board gave to her, was not hers.

Justice Amrita Sinha gave the order on Friday.

The test, which is to shortlist candidates for teachers’ jobs in government-aided primary schools, was held in 2021 following a notification in 2017.

Tina Mukhopadhyay, who wrote TET, sought a hard copy of the OMR from the board in April 2022 after she failed to clear the test.

Sudipta Dasgupta, a lawyer representing Mukhopadhyay, said they moved the court as the photocopy of the OMR that the board gave to Mukhopadhyay was not that of his client.

The board on Friday placed before the court a resolution in which it stated that the hard copies of answer scripts of TET 2017, whose results were published on January 10, 2022, were destroyed under the instructions of the then board president, Manik Bhattacharya. A notice was issued by the board on January 20, 2022, which stated that it would issue OMR sheets of TET 2017 to applicants who would apply by April 19, 2022.

The copy of the resolution said: “In spite of this, as per verbal instruction of the then board president, a letter was issued to the confidential section obstructing a recycling of OMR sheets while only preserving the data digitally.”

“The members of the new committee expressed their dissent on the matter and noted that the decision of scrapping TET-20-17 OMR sheets was singularly taken by the then president without any resolution of the ad-hoc committee.”

The court on Friday asked the board to produce a digitized copy of the petitioner’s OMR.