How one of India’s biggest jobs scandals was executed

“Teachers have the onerous task of inculcating values. They have the task of creating and maintaining a pristine atmosphere around a student so as to nurture creativity. It would be naïve to accept such qualities from persons obtaining employment by dubious means,” observed the Calcutta High Court while setting aside the entire recruitment process for teaching and non-teaching staff in West Bengal. The high court judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court on April 3.The two judgments affected almost 25,000 people recruited for government-aided educational institutes by the West Bengal School Selection Commission (WBSSC) through a process which started in 2016 but went on up to 2020. The process, the two courts ruled, was so “unashamedly” manipulative that the teachers it produced should have no business getting anywhere near a young student.Of the 25,000 recruitments, more than 18,000 were for teaching staff for Classes IX to XII.The sheer number of people affected by the judgment, coupled with the fact that the courts refused to protect those who were supposedly “untainted”, led to some outrage. The Calcutta HC, however, had given reasons for not being able to separate “the grain from the chaff”, calling the fraud perpetuated “too deep and pervasive” to allow separation of the tainted from the untainted.The two court orders deal in some detail about how the scam was perpetuated from start to end. Here’s how norms were trampled upon in what can possibly be only described as the Great Bengal Recruitment Scam.A scandal right from the word goThe WBSSC appointed M/s NYSA without any open tender process to evaluate candidates and maintain a soft-copy database of all the tests/exams.NYSA’s appointment gave the impression that the commission wanted to make sure that NYSA, and nobody else, got the contract. It just invited a few firms to apply and then selected NYSA as it was “the lowest bidder”.The HC judgment noted that the WBSSC did not produce any document to show if it had done any evaluation to check if NYSA was qualified to carry out the work. “Letter of appointment of M/s NYSA contains only two lines which requires M/s NYSA to scan and evaluate the OMR sheets. No other terms and conditions of the appointment have been specified,” the judgment said.As often is the case in such scams, NYSA subcontracted the work of maintaining a soft-copy database of answer sheets to M/s Data Scantech Solutions. While the court records mention that the answer sheets were scanned inside WBSSC’s offices, the WBSSC curiously submitted that it did not even know that the scanning work was carried out by Data Scantech.The court concluded that the appointment of both NYSA and Data Scantech was “unashamedly orchestrated” to “facilitate, implement and perpetuate” the eventual fraud. medium120253813Appointment letter without job; job without appointment letterNo merit list of the written examination and the typing test was ever made public. The WBSSC simply issued a list of individuals who were selected for further processing.No wonder then that people, who did not attempt either of the two tests, were also among those cleared for the next step of processing. This, the court noted, only came to light after some candidates, who were unsuccessful, challenged the appointments.Some of the grievances raised in the numerous petitions filed before the Calcutta HC were:1. People received appointment letters but were not allowed to join.2. Non-publication of the fourth phase of the counselling list contrary to the rules.3. Rank jumping, i.e. candidates holding the rank below the petitioner(s) getting appointment letters. [The WBSSC had not made the merit list public. The rank jumping became apparent only after the CBI got hold of the original database. Also, some candidates managed to secure some answer sheets using RTI.]4. Candidates in the waiting list for Group D posts in the panel [shortlisted] published on June 20, 2019 were ignored, as a new notification dated June 14, 2021 published initiating a new recruitment process.5. Pick and choose method in selecting candidates and flouting of recruitment rules.6. Candidate(s) neither in the merit list nor in the waiting list given appointment letters. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/_XBG--WXi2o?si=suyYD45sfzu-YISEAppointed without examsThe 2016 notification issued by the WBSSC for regional- and state-level selection tests involved 12,905 posts for assistant teachers for Classes IX and X; 5,712 assistant teachers for Classes XI and XII; 2,067 non-teaching staff under Group C; and 3,956 non-teaching staff under Group D.This meant that the total vacancies across all categories were 24,640. However, after the recruitment process ended, recommendations made by the WBSSC were for only 22,930 posts.There was also a mismatch between the answer sheets database with the WBSSC and the data maintained by NYSA in at least 4,091 cases.CBI investigations showed that 8,163 mark-sheets were manipulated.As per a data set provided by the WBSSC, there were 926 cases of rank-jumping and 1,498 people were appointed despite not featuring in any of the tests and therefore not being part of the recruitment process.Some people who were appointed were found to have submitted blank answer sheets. One of Calcutta HC’s orders described this number as “large”.And that is not all. The number of candidates who got the appointment letters outstripped the number of candidates “recommended for appointment” by the WBSSC. The gap was significant — 2,355. This took the total appointments to 25,735, 1,095 more than the total vacancies across all categories as per the 2016 notification.It was the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) which was responsible for issuing the appointment letters. Before the court, the Board maintained that it received all the recommendations from different regional offices of the WBSSC — mostly hand-delivered and some through the post. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/R5Xa536U55s?si=MD6GjM1A3PW7HN60Why were all records destroyed?Curiously enough, all the records maintained at the WBSSC office were destroyed in July 2019 while the recruitment process was still on.A copy of the database maintained by NYSA was passed on to the WBSSC in addition to the physical records that originally existed with the WBSSC.Citing a particular rule for the recruitment process, an executive order issued on July 22, 2019 directed the destruction of all the records.However, court orders note that the WBSSC provided scanned copies to the candidates from 2018 right till 2023, claiming that they were from the WBSSC database.The CBI recovered three hard disks from the residence of one of the former employees of NYSA in September 2022 — more than three years after the WBSSC had destroyed its records.Similar files were also recovered from Data Scantech and most of the anomalies like rank jumping were accepted by the WBSSC only after these discoveries.Also, the CBI did not find any scanned copies at the WBSSC’s offices, which, according to the Calcutta HC, indicated that the WBSSC officials were taking NYSA employees’ help, after they had destroyed their own records, to reply to RTI applications by candidates seeking details of their answer sheets. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/ZVf67BwD_GA?si=GcV6qoDbpKqZS1kLMother of all cover-upsThe WBSSC filed two petitions before the Calcutta HC seeking extra posts in the recruitment process so that those who were appointed without even appearing for any exam could be retained.This did not go down well with the court and it sought to know who had approved this request, to which the WBSSC head took the responsibility.The court, however, sought all the records from the WBSSC office pertaining to this request and it came to light that it was approved by the state cabinet.The principal secretary of the state appeared before the HC in November 2022 and produced a cabinet note and a cabinet memo regarding the request for supernumerary posts.The cabinet decision was of May that year. Based on the objections raised by the original petitioners and the court’s approach, the WBSSC eventually sought to withdraw its petition.The court, however, rejected the WBSSC’s petition. The Calcutta HC finally directed the CBI to investigate this aspect as well — creation of supernumerary posts.“It is shocking that, at the level of the cabinet of the state government, decision is taken to protect employment obtained fraudulently in a selection process conducted by SSC for state-funded schools, knowing fully well that, such appointments were obtained beyond the panel [shortlist] and after expiry of the panel, at the bare minimum,” the HC observed.The Supreme Court in a separate order on April 8, five days after it allowed scrapping of the entire recruitment process, set aside the Calcutta HC order for CBI investigation into West Bengal government’s request for supernumerary posts.