Bengal school job case: CBI submits report on OMR tampering to Calcutta HC

Kolkata: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday submitted a report to a single- judge bench of the Calcutta High Court on the progress of investigation into the irregularities in appointment of primary teachers through manipulation in the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets.

The CBI counsel submitted the report in a sealed envelope at the bench of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay. The next hearing in the matter at the same bench will be on January 4.

Earlier, in August this year the CBI had submitted a report to Justice Gangopadjyay’s bench. However, he was not satisfied with that report and observed that there had not been much progress in the matter.

The petitioners alleged that there were lots of irregularities in the digitized data of the OMR sheets used in the written examinations for primary teachers.

As the findings, tampering of OMR sheets was one of the five methods applied in the alleged school job case, the other four being appointment without recommendation letters, appointments from expired-panels, appointment of those without names in the merit lost and finally appointments through rank-jumps.

Preliminary investigations have also revealed that the number of beneficiaries through this tampering of OMR sheets is much more than the appointments made by applying the other four methods. This trend is not just in case of primary teachers but also in case of secondary and higher secondary teachers.

Preliminary investigation has also revealed many incidents of OMR manipulation in case of appointments of non-teaching staff in Group-C and Group-D categories in different state-run schools.