The Supreme Court has invalidated 25,753 teaching and non-teaching jobs in Bengal because it couldn’t reliably distinguish between legitimate appointments and those obtained through manipulation. This sweeping decision came despite the School Service Commission (SSC)’s attempts to identify “tainted” appointments.
A distinction that came up following years of the CBI probe and was accepted by the SSC failed to satisfy the apex court. The protesting school staff believe such a distinction can still be made and want to appeal to the top court to review its order.
For that, they have asked the commission to publish the OMR sheets of their tests. The SSC is seeking legal opinion on whether it can do that.
But what exactly is an OMR sheet? If it is there, then why the difficulty in identifying the “tainted” appointments from those that are not?
The Telegraph tries to find the answers:
What are OMR sheets?
Optical Mark Recognition sheets are forms with checkboxes used for multiple-choice questions in large-scale exams. These machine-readable sheets allow for quick, accurate evaluation of thousands of tests. The 2016 state-level selection test (SLST) used these sheets for its initial screening.
Missing evidence problem
The original physical OMR sheets were destroyed by the SSC on July 22, 2019, citing Rule 21 of the Classes IX-X and XI-XII Rules. However, the Supreme Court noted this rule applied only to Assistant Teachers’ positions, not to the non-teaching Group C and D posts that were also affected. Crucially, the commission failed to maintain electronic “mirror copies” (scanned images) of the OMR sheets in their records.
What’s a “mirror copy”?
The scanned image of the physical OMR sheet. They are in the SSC’s possession.
Data recovery efforts
The CBI gave the “mirror image” to the SSC after receiving them from three hard disks they seized from the office of Pankaj Bansal, a former employee of M/s. NYSA, the company hired to tabulate results. These disks contained data from approximately 22 lakh applicants. The data’s integrity was verified by matching hash values with files from Data Scantech Solutions, a sub-contractor that M/s NYSA had used without formal SSC approval.
Why the court rejected partial validation
While the SSC claimed in February that they had identified 5,303 tainted candidates based on the recovered mirror images, the Supreme Court remained unconvinced. The court couldn’t rely solely on recovered data without the commission’s own maintained records to verify it. Additionally, the invalidation wasn’t based only on OMR manipulation but also on numerous other irregularities:
- Lower-ranked candidates receiving preference over higher-ranked ones
- Candidates from outside the shortlist being appointed
- People not recommended by the SSC receiving positions
Current demands from affected staff
The protesting school staff are requesting that the SSC publish the mirror images of all 22 lakh candidates’ OMR sheets, along with the list of those identified as tainted and untainted. They hope this transparency might provide grounds for a review of the court’s decision. The SSC is currently seeking legal advice on whether this is possible.