NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Thursday posed discomfiting questions to Bengal govt and its SSC on the ‘scam’ relating to recruitment of 25,000 teachers and non-teaching staff, and said there are too many flaws in the selection of candidates.
Commencing final hearing on the issue, pending for over a year in SC, which had stayed Calcutta HC order cancelling appointment of teachers and non-teaching staff, a bench of CJI Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar pointed out reasons why HC cancelled the selection process on grounds that tainted and untainted candidates cannot be segregated.
The bench said tainted candidates can be divided into different categories – ineligible, those whose ranks were manipulated to bring them into the selection list, those whose marks were manipulated to make them leapfrog over meritorious candidates, manipulation of OMR (some of which were blank), and those not on the merit list getting appointed.
While enumerating the alleged flaws in the recruitment process, which was advertised in 2016 while appointments made in Jan 2019, CJI Khanna in a lighter vein asked,”Dal mein kuch kala hai ya sab kuch kala hai?”
More than a dozen senior advocates argued for tainted candidates seeking to question the evidence based on which HC quashed appointment of 25,000 candidates, and said this evidence can be tested only through a trial.
The bench said the ‘scam’ in recruitment was detected by the Justice Ranjit Kumar Bag commission and confirmed by CBI. Even SSC admitted to irregularities, and based on all these findings, HC had set aside the appointments, it said and asked what was so fundamentally wrong with the HC order. As many as 22 lakh candidates had competed for 25,000 posts. But their answer sheets were destroyed by SSC in 2020.
For SSC, senior advocate Jaideep Gupta said tainted candidates have been identified by CBI and the figure more or less matches with those identified by SSC. Those appointments can be cancelled, and the rest can be saved, he argued. When certain advocates argued that setting aside the appointments of thousands of teachers would tell upon studies of students from Classes 9 to 12, the bench rejected it point blank, saying, “We will not accept such arguments.”
However, the bench said it would sympathetically consider those departmental candidates who are untainted and had worked for long years before being appointed teachers through this recruitment process. “We will consider allowing their reversion to earlier cadres,” it said while adjourning further hearing to Jan 7. Calcutta HC’s Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who has since resigned and become an MP on a BJP ticket, had noticed the ‘scam’ and sought inquiry through the Justice Bag commission.
