Key Points

The irregularity concerns a section of the "tainted" candidates already identified by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC). These candidates were shown as "non-joined" as per the records of the school education department, which means that these teaching and non-teaching staff have not joined duty despite getting appointments.

The question has now surfaced -- if such candidates were marked as "non-joined" as per records of the state education department, how could they draw salaries for so many years?

Sources from the state education department said there might have been a technical lapse in updating the records of such candidates after they actually joined duties at their respective workplaces. "WBSSC is trying to sort out the matter with the state education department on this count," the official said.

The number of such candidates has not been revealed by the board so far, but sources said that this has rattled all in the department.

The opposition parties in the state have claimed that there had been rampant corruption in every aspect of school-job recruitment, and this was a new angle in the entire corrupt system.

From Thursday afternoon, protests and demonstrations over the loss of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching jobs following a Supreme Court order earlier this month had taken a more complicated turn, as the so-called "tainted" candidates started parallel sit-in protests in front of the WBSSC office, besides that by the "genuine" ones which already started earlier this week.

On one hand, the "genuine" candidates are protesting in demand of the immediate publication of the segregated lists of "genuine" and "tainted" candidates.

On the other hand, the contention of the other group is that their names have been included in the "tainted" list because of some technical errors in their optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court division bench of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar upheld the order of the Calcutta High Court's division bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Shabbar Rashidi last year, cancelling WBSSC's entire 2016 panel of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching jobs.

The apex court also accepted the observation of the Calcutta High Court that the entire panel had to be cancelled because of the failure on the part of the state government and WBSSC to segregate the "genuine" candidates from the "tainted" ones, who got jobs paying money.

- IANS