WBSSC scam: Calcutta HC declines stay on counselling for replacement

KOLKATA: The Calcutta High Court on Wednesday refused to grant an interim stay on the counselling process for freshly recruited non-teaching staff in state-run schools as replacement for those whose services have been terminated on charges of irregularities.

On March 11, following an order by a single judge-bench of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, the services of 842 non-teaching staff in Group C category were terminated. The terminated staff subsequently approached the division bench of Justice Subrata Talukdar and Justice Supratim Bhattacharya.

Meanwhile, as the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) had started the process of counselling for the replacements, counsel for the terminated staff urged the division bench to grant an interim stay on the counselling process, but the court refused.

“The WBSSC is also at fault in this entire process. Let there be a departmental probe against the commission as well. The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education and the district inspectors of the schools should also not be spared. They all cleared the appointment of those whose services have been terminated now,” counsel argued.

He claimed that all the punitive steps have been taken on the basis of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)’s report on the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets recovered from the hard-discs of NYSA in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad.

“Who can say the OMR sheets presented by CBI have also not been tampered with?” the counsel questioned.

However, the CBI objected to this course of argument claiming that the OMR sheets submitted by the central agency are not merely scanned copies. “OMR sheets are not simple pieces of paper. There is a highly technical process of keeping it protected,” the CBI counsel said.

Finally, the division bench refused to grant a stay on the process of counselling.