Can post OMR sheets of 22 lakh candidates after legal advice: WB minister

The West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) is ready to publish the digital mirror images of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets of all 22 lakh candidates who appeared for the 2016 exams with appropriate legal advice, state Education Minister Bratya Basu said on Friday.

The Supreme Court court had on April 3 upheld a 2024 Calcutta High Court judgment annulling the recruitment of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff appointed through the 2016 SSC recruitment drive, terming the entire selection process vitiated and tainted.

Emerging from a meeting with agitating teachers and non-teaching staff, Basu said the state government was hopeful of publishing the list within two weeks.

Basu said although the SSC does not retain its own digital images of the OMR sheets in question, it does possess copies of those sheets retrieved by the CBI during its course of investigation, and which the agency later shared with the commission.

Since the matter concerns a judgment of the Supreme Court which we cannot violate, we are seeking legal advice to publish the list of deserving and tainted candidates by means of putting up the OMR sheets concerned on the SSC website.

If there are no legal hurdles, we should be able to complete the task within two weeks, the minister said, while confirming that the prospective deadline for publication is April 21.