Supreme Court Calls West Bengal Recruitment Scam A ‘Systematic Fraud’

The Supreme Court termed the alleged recruitment scam in West Bengal as ‘systematic fraud’. The bench consisted of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, Justice J B Pardiwala, and Justice Manoj Misra was hearing the petition that challenged the Calcutta High Court’s April 22 decision invalidating the appointment of over 25,000 teaching and non-teaching staff in state-run and state-aided schools of West Bengal held by the School Service Commission (SSC).

The CJI raised the question of public faith in the government and the system. Justice Chandrachud highlighted the issue of already scarce government jobs and their role in social mobility. He asked the state government’s lawyer about the means to restore public faith and measures to countenance this. While terming the scandal as a systemic fraud, the Chief Justice said that the authorities are duty-bound to maintain the documents in the digitized format.

Reportedly, SSC appointed M/s NYSA to scan and evaluate the OMR sheets via closed-door tender, which violates Articles 14 and 16 of the constitution. NYSA engaged Data Scantech, to scan the OMR sheets without the knowledge of SSC. Moreover, SSC destroyed the original OMR sheets and claimed that the scanned mirror images were saved on its server. SSC provided scanned OMR sheets to RTI applicants from 2018 to 2023 from its server. However, CBI did not find any images in the SSC server.

Criticising the government the bench said that they had to maintain supervisory control and it is obvious there is no data. The authorities remained unaware that the service provider had engaged another agency, the bend told the state government’s lawyer.

The state government challenged the Calcutta High Court order arguing that the appointments were cancelled arbitrarily. Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that canceling all appointments is unacceptable if it is possible to separate the grain from the chaff. However, the high court argued that applying grain and the chaff test was impossible in the current case as the entire selection process was tainted.