Bengal school job case: CBI raids offices of agency supplying OMR sheets for recruitment examination

Kolkata : In a renewed drive in the multi-crore cash-for-school job case in West Bengal, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) started a massive raid and search operation on Tuesday at the different offices of the outsourced agency responsible for supply of optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets to WBSSC and WBBPE for conducting recruitment examinations.

First a Kolkata- based top official of the said outsourced entity, S. Basu Roy & Company, Kaushik Maji was summoned and questioned at the agency’s Nizam Palace office in central Kolkata and subsequently different teams of CBI started raid and search operations at different outfits of the entity.

Sources said that among the places where the raid and search operations are continuing include the offices and warehouses of the outsourced entity as well as the residences of some top officials of the entity.

The renewed activity of CBI in the matter started just a day after, the sleuths of Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is conducting a parallel probe in the school job case, faced the ire of the Calcutta High Court’s single- judge bench of Justice Amrita Sinha for submitting incomplete details on the assets and properties of Trinamool Congress’ national General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

The role of the outsourced entity in the entire scam surfaced quite some time back after Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of Calcutta High Court in June this year questioned how this private outsourced agency had access to the “confidential section” of West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE).

Justice Gangopadhyay then also questioned whether there was any legal provision for WBBPE to give access to this section to a private entity. “Any outside entity cannot be considered as a part of the confidential section. It is not right for the board to allow an outside agency to verify data or information separately,” Justice Gangopadhyay observed then.