Kolkata: In a significant setback to the Mamata Banerjee government in Bengal, the Supreme Court today (April 3) upheld the decision of the Calcutta high court to invalidate nearly 25,000 teaching and non-teaching staff appointments made by the School Selection Commission in 2016.
The bench of the Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar agreed to the high court’s conclusion – that the selection process was vitiated by fraud and said that it was “tainted beyond resolution.”
The Calcutta high court had said on April 22, 2024, that the new appointment procedure had to begin within 15 days of the Lok Sabha polls ending that year, that the salaries of those who have been appointed illegally have to be returned with 12% interest in four weeks and that the Central Bureau of Investigation will continue to probe the matter.
“Manipulation and fraud on a large scale, coupled with the intention to cover up have tainted the selection process beyond repair. The legitimacy and credibility of the selection process are denuded,” CJI Khanna said, according to LiveLaw.
The court heard a batch of petitions challenging the high court order and said today that it found “no reason to interfere with the direction of the High Court that the services of the tainted candidates, where appointed, must be terminated and they will be required to refund any salaries and payment they received.”
“Since the appointments are result of fraud and cheating, we see no justification to alter this direction,” the apex court added.
Also read: Bengal SSC Recruitment Scam: RTIs, Scanned Signatures and the Process of Forging Lists
The court also said that the “egregious violations” made in the appointments go against Articles 14 and 16 of the constitution.
Candidates already employed will not be asked to refund the payments made to them but their appointments will be cancelled.
The court also asked for a fresh selection process has to be initiated and completed within 3 months. The new process can have certain relaxed rules for candidates who did not get jobs wrongfully.
The scam had rocked Bengal, with wronged candidates – representing the group which had not been selected – holding months of protests to be heard. The WBSSC, meanwhile, claimed that it had destroyed the original OMR or answer sheets a year after the exam. The Central Bureau of Investigation found a mismatch in soft copies of the OMR sheets with the WBSSC and with an employee of a private firm tasked with scanning and evaluation.
The Calcutta high court had considered a 300-page report by the CBI and highlighted 17 issues. A bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Mohammed Shabbar Rashidi had said that the SSC had wilfully destroyed proofs and meet secretly to hand over the scanning of OMR sheets to a company called NYSA which then handed the same job over to another company, ScanTech.
