Bengal school job case: CBI seizes two servers from outsourced agency's office

Kolkata: The CBI officials investigating the cash-for-school job case in West Bengal have seized two servers from the office of S. Basu Roy & Company, the outsourced agency responsible for providing optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets for written examination for primary teachers’ recruitment in state-run schools, sources said on Thursday.

Since Thursday morning a team of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials, accompanied by cyber and software experts, were conducting a fresh round of raid and search operation at that office. Earlier, a similar raid and search operation was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The central agency officials are taking the help of the cyber and software experts following a directive from Calcutta High Court’s single-judge bench of Justice Rajasekhar Mantha, who advised CBI to take the help of any specialised agency to recover the data regarding the OMR sheets.

However, the CBI sleuths are tight-lipped on whether the latest raid and search operation have led to any significant recovery in the matter.

As per the directive of Justice Mantha, the entire cost for bearing the assistance of expert agencies is supposed to be borne by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE).

Significantly, on July 9, the WBBPE counsel made an explosive revelation at Justice Mantha’s bench claiming that the OMR sheets used in the written examination in 2017 for recruitment of primary teachers in state-run schools of West Bengal were destroyed. This was done following the instructions of the Trinamool Congress legislator and former WBBPE chairman Manik Bhattacharya, said the counsel.

The WBBPE counsel also informed the court that the decision to destroy the OMR sheets was taken independently by Bhattacharya without any resolution adopted by other members of the board in the matter.