The CBI has sought a list of the candidates who had allegedly secured jobs through unfair means from the school service commission (SSC) as a part of its probe into the ongoing case.
Senior officers of the central investigating agency said the commission has been asked to submit separate lists of teaching and non-teaching staff from the State Level Selection Test 2016.
The lists should have the names of the candidates, their roll numbers, marks scored along with the details of the date of appointments, the officers said.
“The lists bearing the details of such candidates will form an important part of the evidence in our investigation into the alleged irregularities,” the officer said. The officer did not provide any further details.
A few members of the CBI’s special investigation team (SIT) said the lists would help explain why the need was felt to create supernumerary posts to make room for additional candidates in the selection list.
The move comes within three days of the Calcutta High Court’s division bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Mohammad Shabbar Rashidi scrapping close to 26,000 jobs and directing the central investigating agency to conduct a probe into the creation of supernumerary posts to accommodate illegal appointees.
The state government had appointed around 24,600 teaching and non-teaching staff in state-aided schools based on a written test in 2016 and the personality tests that followed.
The merit lists for Group C and Group D staff expired in May 2019, and those for secondary and higher secondary teachers in December 2019.
Investigations by the CBI revealed that over 1,000 appointments were allegedly made after the expiry of the merit lists.
The recruitment process took place during the tenure of then SSC chairman Subires Bhattacharya.
Bhattacharya was arrested by the CBI in 2022 on the charge of involvement in the alleged irregularities.
The SSC, responsible for the recruitments, said anomalies had been found in the case of around 5,000 appointees, and not all the 25,000.
On Thursday, the commission said the list was already with the central investigating agency.
“We have submitted separate affidavits since last December where it was spelt out clearly that 5,300 teaching and non-teaching staff were allegedly recruited through irregularities,” Siddhartha Majumdar, SSC chairperson, said on Thursday.
“The lists were also shared with the CBI,” Majumdar said.
The CBI said it did not have any scanned or mirror copies of the optical marks recognition (OMR) sheets of the candidates. The copies were not stored in the SSC server, the CBI said.
The division bench of the Calcutta High Court, while scrapping the appointments, had ordered the CBI to probe the role of officials in the state government who approved the creation of supernumerary posts to accommodate illegal appointees.
The court said in its order that the CBI shall submit its report on further investigations preferably within three months “from date” to the jurisdictional court.
