The West Bengal School Service Commission has “withdrawn” the process of filling vacant Group C and D posts in government-aided schools from a pool of waitlisted candidates because the high court has said the list must not include those who made it to the merit list by “manipulation” in the written test held in 2017.
The court had on Wednesday said the “CBI has found that manipulations have been made”.
The commission had on Wednesday announced the start of an exercise to ascertain the number of vacant posts. On Thursday, it said it had decided to “withdraw the notice for the time being”.
It said it would identify the waitlisted candidates whose OMR sheets were not manipulated, a process that would take some time, before coming up with a second notice. Commission chairman Siddhartha Majumdar said they were ascertaining the number of non-teaching posts following the “removal of wrongly appointed candidates”, in compliance with an order issued by Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay.
“Accordingly, we came up with a notice announcing that the counselling process will commence on November 7. Waitlisted candidates were to be called for counselling. But on September 28, Justice Gandopadhayay ordered that these waitlisted candidates would not include those whose OMR sheets (in the 2017 TET), as found by the CBI, were manipulated. That has prompted us to withdraw the exercise,” Majumdar told Metro.
The judge had on Wednesday said a CBI investigation had revealed that commission officials had changed the marks obtained by some candidates, who had appeared in tests seeking jobs as teachers for Classes IX to XII and also as Group C and D staff.
Subires Bhattacaharyya, former chairman of the West Bengal School Service Commission; Shanti Prasad Sinha, former chairman of the school service commission’s advisory committee; and Ashok Saha, former secretary of the commission, are in custody in connection with the alleged manipulations.
A notice issued by the commission’s secretary on Thursday says: “In view of the above (court order), the notice stands withdrawn for the time being. Therefore, the counselling process from the waitlist for recommendation in the posts falling vacant by the removal of illegally appointed persons can only start after identifying the waitlisted persons whose OMR sheets are not manipulated.”
