One of the petitioners whose allegations of corruption in school recruitments led to the termination of 25,753 jobs herself features on a list of “tainted candidates” that the school service commission put out on Thursday.
According to the list, Laxmi Tunga is among 1,853 non-teaching-job aspirants who were waitlisted but not appointed, and have been found guilty of “OMR mismatch” in the CBI investigation.
This means the OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) sheets of these candidates were tampered with, suggesting their scores may have been fraudulently inflated.
“The name of the petitioner features among the tainted waitlisted candidates, which the court asked us to publish,” SSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar said.
“Earlier, during the hearing of the case, our lawyer Sutanu Patra had informed the court that she (Tunga) was among those found tainted by the CBI in its investigation.”
Tunga had moved court after failing to be selected for appointment to a Group D job at a government-aided school on the basis of the recruitment test conducted by the SSC in 2016.
On Thursday, the commission also uploaded a list of 253 candidates waitlisted but not appointed to teaching jobs, and accused of OMR mismatch.
The commission’s list of candidates “whose names featured in the CBI’s list of OMR mismatch but who were not appointed via the 3rd RLST Exam (Non-teaching Staff), 2016” mentions Tunga’s roll number for the regional-level selection test. It also cites the name of a guardian and the category of job — Group D — she had appeared for.
Ratul Biswas, one of the lawyers representing the SSC in court, said the list had been uploaded following a Supreme Court order last year. Earlier, the SSC had published lists of “tainted” candidates who had been appointed and sacked.
Representatives of the platform of teachers who have lost their jobs despite not being found “tainted” wondered how a “tainted” candidate could file a petition demanding the entire recruitment panel be revoked on the grounds of illegality.
“The lawyers representing Tunga knew that their petitioner was among the tainted but suppressed the fact,” a leader of the platform, Mehboob Mandal, said.
“It appears that Tunga filed the case because she did not get a job while many other tainted candidates were recruited. In the process, the entire recruitment panel got revoked, with 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff at the secondary and higher secondary levels of government-aided schools losing their jobs.”
Firdaus Shamim, a lawyer who represented Tunga in court, said: “That Laxmi Tunga’s name features on the list of the tainted goes to show that there was institutional corruption. The commission took money even from those who had not been appointed.
“I did not know that Tunga was a tainted candidate. Tunga was among the thousands of candidates who challenged the recruitment process.”
Calcutta High Court had scrapped the entire recruitment panel on April 22, 2024.
The Supreme Court upheld the high court order on April 3, 2025, saying the recruitment process had been “vitiated beyond redemption”.
Some 17,209 teachers and 8,544 Group C and Group D staff at government-aided schools lost their jobs.
A fresh selection test for teaching jobs was held in September. The test for non-teaching staff is yet to be held.
With the application process for that test yet to begin, the SSC had initially uploaded a list of 3,512 “tainted” candidates who had been appointed, sacked and barred from the fresh process.
Ahead of the teacher selection tests in September, the commission had uploaded a list of 1,809 “tainted” candidates — those appointed as teachers, sacked and barred from the fresh process.
The court later insisted on the publication of the names of the “tainted” among the waitlisted, both for teaching and non-teaching categories, so they too could be barred from the new recruitment drive.