The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the Calcutta High Court’s April 2024 order cancelling the entire recruitment panel of the 2016 West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC), resulting in job losses of over 25,000 teaching (for classes 9, 10, 11 and 12) and non-teaching staff (for Group C and D).
A division bench comprising Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar noted that the recruitment process was marred by widespread corruption, making it impossible to differentiate between eligible and ineligible candidates.
The court ordered the state to initiate a new recruitment process within three months and allowed those not implicated in misconduct to reapply. Furthermore, it ruled that individuals whose appointments were revoked must return their salaries. Additionally, those who had previously held government jobs but left them for SSC positions can return to their former roles, provided they apply for a transfer within three months.
The Central Bureau of Investigation will continue its probe into the matter, and the Supreme Court also upheld the High Court’s order for an investigation against the state cabinet. On February 10, the apex court had reserved its judgement after hearing arguments from all stakeholders. CJI Khanna had earlier said that it was impossible to authenticate the accuracy of what would be the right information.
Throughout the hearings at both the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court, it became evident that most candidates secured their jobs legitimately. However, their lives have now been changed, as they must bear the consequences of a few fraudulent individuals who obtained jobs through bribery.
The proceedings at the Supreme Court, 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 benefited from irregularities from those who were legitimately appointed.
Senior advocate Jaideep Gupta, representing SSC, informed the court that the commission’s application had classified candidates based on their involvement in irregularities. This classification was based on instances of “rank jumping” and “out-of-panel” appointments. However, the court noted that SSC had not cross-verified the data provided by M/s NYSA.
M/s NYSA, responsible for processing OMR sheets, had outsourced this task to Data Scantech. The CBI reported recovering authentic scanned OMR sheet images from NYSA employee Pankaj Bansal. However, senior advocate Karuna Nandy, representing accused candidates, challenged the CBI, arguing that its charge-sheet lacked clear evidence to identify specific individuals.
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In a previous hearing, senior advocate Dushyant Dave, representing Group C employees, alleged that the CBI did a “casual investigation” on the direction of a former Calcutta High Court judge, who has since entered politics, and failed to properly distinguish guilty candidates from the innocent ones.
The investigation was initially ordered by former Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who is now a BJP MP, before a division bench led by Justices Debangsu Basak and Shabbar Rashidi overturned the entire 2016 State Level Selection Test (SLST) panel for state-aided schools.
The Supreme Court had called the recruitment scandal a "systemic fraud", emphasising that the state had failed to act on its responsibility of maintaining digitised records of appointments.
