Daal mein kuch kaala hain ya sab kuchh kaala hain? SC questions authenticity of scanned OMRs in Bengal recruitment scam case
New Delhi/IBNS: The Supreme Court Wednesday pointed out the need to examine the authenticity of the electronic data stored in the database of the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) to understand whether there can be a distinction made between 'tainted' and 'untainted' candidates.
The apex court made the observations during a hearing of the West Bengal SSC teachers' recruitment case where a batch of petitions challenged the Calcutta High Court's order setting aside the appointments by the West Bengal School Selection Commission to over 24,000 teaching and non-teaching posts in government schools.
The bench, comprising CJI Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar, pointed out that the core issue for the court right now is to consider the credibility of the scanned data of the original copies of the OMR sheets as there is no concrete proof that the original OMR sheets, after being collected from the candidates, were not tampered with before scanning.
The SSC has admitted to having destroyed the original OMR sheets after 1 year of the exam in sync with the exam rules.
"The question today is the authenticity of the data scanned and the data found in the hard disk, that itself is the subject matter," CJI Sanjiv Khanna said.
He raised question if the tampering of the results happened before the scanning and uploading of the data either by replacing the OMR answer sheet or filling out the correct answers in a blank copy submitted by a candidate.
"Original paper is OMR, if any manipulation is done, it is visible on the sheet, what happens is there are cases in which people do not fill in full answers and there is a possibility of filling those, or there is the possibility of changing the OMR sheet, we don't even know how the checking took place, whether the name was camouflaged," he said.
The SSC earlier tasked a private company called NYSA Communications for scanning and evaluations of the OMR sheets, which was done at the office of the SSC.
However, NYSA had sub-delegated the task of scanning to an entity called DATA Scantech Solutions in Noida which was present at the premises of SSC to complete the scanning work.
Earlier, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) informed the bench led by then CJI DY Chandrachud that the images of the OMR were handed over by DATA Scantech Solutions to NYSA Communications Private Limited in digital form leaving the original hard copies of the OMR sheets in the office of the SSC.
According to the CBI report, the SSC handed over the answer keys for all subjects to NYSA Communications Private Limited for evaluating the OMR responses.
The CBI seized the server database of the SSC during the investigation.
In its observation, the Calcutta High Court had said that the stated that recruitment panel of 2016 had been tainted due to the irregularities with the OMR sheets as many of them were found blank and were liable to be cancelled.
The court also found that many of those whose appointments had been challenged were done after the panel for the 2016 recruitment had expired by submitting blank OMR sheets.
In view of the above projection, the court had also directed an investigation into those who perpetrated the fraud and disposed of the pleas by canceling the entire 2016 SSC Recruitment Panel.
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