The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, heard the matters related to the alleged West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment scam, where the appointments of over 23,000 teaching and non-teaching staff were cancelled by the Calcutta High Court in April last year.
During the hearing, senior advocate Dushyan Dave, representing the Group-C employees at risk of losing their jobs if the apex court fails to separate tainted candidates from the rightful ones, argued that the CBI did a “casual investigation” on the direction of a former Calcutta High Court judge who is now a politician.
Although the High Court division bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Shabbar Rashidi nullified the entire 2016 State Level Selection Test (SLST) panel for state-aided schools, the CBI investigation into the matter was initiated under the directive of former Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who is now a BJP MP.
“There was corruption. But there was no proper investigation about it to discover how the corruption took place and how many people were involved. Had a proper investigation taken place, there would not have been this problem in differentiating deserving and undeserving candidates,” Dave told the bench of Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar.
Without naming the former Calcutta High Court justice, the senior advocate added, “The CBI did a casual investigation on the direction of the High Court. That [High Court] judge is now associated with politics. That is his personal matter. But there are flaws in the investigation.”
Dave further said the Calcutta High Court did not properly understand what the CBI submitted. He also claimed that the OMR sheet seized by the CBI during its investigation was not done legally.
Senior advocate Mukul Rohtagi, appearing for another batch of staff who could lose their jobs, argued that the original OMR sheet has not been found. But the scanned copies that have been recovered were sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) in Hyderabad first and then to Kolkata.
Rohtagi said the Calcutta High Court verdict overlooked the pending CFSL report. He claimed that the currently available findings of manipulation by some were not conclusive to cancel the jobs of thousands of other staff who did not take illegal route.
The court relisted the matter for the next hearing on January 27.