After hearing arguments from all the stakeholders in the case, the Supreme Court of India on Monday reserved its judgement on the alleged West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment scam. The case involves the cancellation of over 23,000 teaching and non-teaching appointments by the Calcutta High Court in April last year.
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During the hearing, a division bench led by Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna, along with Justice Sanjay Kumar, listened to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which alleged massive corruption in the recruitment process.
The proceedings, which involved 124 petitions—including one from the West Bengal government challenging the high court’s decision—focused on whether it was possible to distinguish candidates who benefitted from irregularities from those who were legitimately appointed.
Senior advocate Jaideep Gupta, representing SSC, informed the court that the commission’s application contained a detailed break up of tainted and untainted candidates. This classification was based on instances of “rank-jumping” and “out-of-panel” appointments.
The court observed that the SSC had not cross-verified data provided by M/s NYSA, the company responsible for scanning and evaluating OMR sheets, against the original records. The company, meanwhile, had outsourced the task to another firm called Data Scantech.
The CBI stated that it had recovered scanned images of OMR sheets from Pankaj Bansal, an employee of NYSA, asserting that these documents were authentic. The agency further claimed that the hash value of the data retrieved from Bansal matched that of Data Scantech.
However, the investigating agency’s claim was contested. Senior advocate Karuna Nandy, on behalf of allegedly tainted candidates, argued that there was no clear evidence to single out a specific group and that the CBI’s chargesheet lacked clarity.
CJI Khanna said that it was impossible to authenticate the accuracy of what would be the right information. Previously, the Supreme Court had described the recruitment controversy as a "systemic fraud", saying that state authorities were responsible for maintaining digitised records of appointments.
