5,303 illegally appointed candidates, school service commission tells Supreme Court
Telegraph | 1 March 2025
The school service commission (SSC) submitted to the Supreme Court in mid-February that 5,303 candidates were allegedly appointed illegally as teaching and non-teaching staff in secondary and higher secondary sections of government-aided schools, the commission chief said on Thursday.
The commission submitted an affidavit on February 15, five days after the Supreme Court completed hearing a writ petition filed by the state government challenging a Calcutta High Court order to scrap the appointments of over 23,000 teaching and non-teaching staff following complaints of corruption in the recruitment process.
The commission’s submission, which The Telegraph has gone through, says the number of people “identified having dispute in OMR (optical mark recognition) issue” stands at 4,091.
The number of persons identified “as tainted in the category of rank jumping and out of panel but appointed” stands at 1,212.
“....Therefore, the actual number of tainted persons is 5,303 (1,212 + 4,091),” said advocate Jaideep Gupta’s written submission on behalf of the commission.
Dispute in OMR issue means, for 4,091 candidates the marks uploaded on the commission’s server did not tally with the mirror image of their OMR sheets as provided by CBI, said an SSC official.
The submission by the commission says: “If the materials recovered by the CBI from Mr Pankaj Bansal, ex-employee of M/s NYSA, is held to be reliable data,” the disputed case in OMR issue stands at 4,091.
Rank jumping means candidates towards the bottom of the merit list were pushed up by alleged manipulation so they came into the zone of consideration when the appointments were made.
Commission chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar said that during the hearing on February 10, they told the apex court the SSC would give the exact figures to the Supreme Court soon.
“We have submitted to the Supreme Court a corrected figure based on the CBI probe. The commission is of the view this figure will help the apex court conclude,” chairperson Majumder told Metro.
An SSC official said initially it was being said the figure of undeserving candidates stood at 5,845.
“There were some common candidates in the two groups — persons ‘identified as having a dispute in OMR issue’ and persons ‘identified as tainted in the category of rank jumping and out of the panel but appointed’. We sanitised the figures and gave the actual number to the Supreme Court,” the official said.
The SSC in its submission before the apex court has also sought to counter the high court’s observation in its April 22, 2024, order that the appointment of over 23,000 teachers and non-teaching staff at the secondary and higher secondary levels stood cancelled because it was impossible to segregate the illegal appointments from the legal ones.
“The finding that the commission has failed to disclose information before the Hon’ble high court is incorrect. The commission filed affidavits, as mentioned hereinabove, before the Hon’ble high court. In the said affidavits, the commission not only cooperated with Hon’ble court as is duty bound and has also demonstrated that it is entirely possible to segregate the tainted candidates from those who had not been involved in any wrongdoing,” the submission says.