Bengal SSC begins preparing list of eligible-ineligible job losers after Supreme Court verdict
Times of India | 13 April 2025
The 13-member delegation met minister Bratya Basu on Friday KOLKATA: West Bengal School Service Commission on Saturday began the process of identifying "tainted" and "untainted" candidates, a day after state education minister Bratya Basu said the eligible-ineligible list would be published on the SSC portal subject to legal advice.
22 lakh appeared in 2016 exam
SSC officials are collating information from the mirror images of 22 lakh OMR sheets that they have received from CBI. During its investigation, the central agency had recovered hard disks containing scanned copies of the OMR sheets from the Ghaziabad residence of a former employee of Nysa Communications, the agency hired to manage the OMR sheets. CBI had also recovered data from the server seized from the SSC office.
Earlier, based on these data, SSC had prepared a list of 5,017 school staffers who had obtained jobs illegally - 926 were involved in rank jumping and 4,091 were recommended despite OMR mismatches. This apart, 1,498 candidates who did not even figure in the 2016 recruitment panel were also given appointments. SSC acknowledged that 6,276 illegal appointments were made after excluding 239 candidates who fell under both OMR mismatch and rank-jumping.
The SSC team will again vet this list and draw up a fresh one of candidates who secured their jobs by fair means. "The entire lot of 22 lakh OMR sheets needs to be cross-checked before being uploaded," said an official. At the same time, the commission is in touch with its legal team.
Will act according to legal advice: SSC chairperson
On Friday, the minister and SSC officials held a three-hour meeting with a 13-member delegation of protesting teachers, at the end of which Basu had announced that he had agreed to the demand of publishing the list of eligible and ineligible candidates among the 26,000 school staffers who had lost their jobs. The task of preparing the segregated lists would take a fortnight and these could be published around April 21, subject to legal advice, he had said. He had also assured the protesting teachers that law permitting, the mirror images of all 22 lakh OMR sheets would be uploaded on the SSC portal.
On Saturday, SSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumder once again told TOI that they would "act according to the legal advice" they receive.
A Supreme Court bench of CJI Sanjiv Khanna and Justice PV Sanjiv Kumar had on April 3 upheld a Calcutta High Court order cancelling the entire 2016 SSC recruitment panel saying the appointments were vitiated by manipulation and fraud. "This is a case wherein the entire selection process has been vitiated and tainted beyond resolution," the SC had observed.
The SSC wants to ensure that its review petition before the SC is error-free and backed by supporting documents.