In a major setback for over 24,000 employees (both teaching and non-teaching) of the State aided schools, the Calcutta High Court on Monday cancelled all their jobs provided under the 2016 Recruitment Process by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC). [Baisakhi Bhattacharyya vs State of West Bengal]A Bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Md Shabbar Rashidi while holding the recruitment invalid, ordered the 24,000 candidates to return the salaries they received after being "illegally" recruited."Let the said candidates return the salaries within four weeks. The District Magistrate will have to collect the amounts," the Court ordered.Over 23 lakh candidates had appeared in the examinations for the 24,000 job vacancies in 2016. It was alleged that most candidates were given jobs after wrongly evaluating the OMR Sheets.The bench noted that there was no clarity which of the 23 lakh sheets were evaluated properly and therefore, ordered re-evaluation of all the sheets of the recruitment entrance exams.Further, the WBSSC was ordered to initiate a fresh recruitment process.The Court also ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to continue with the investigation into the recruitment scam.The infamous School Jobs for Cash Scam pertains to various illegal recruitments made in the primary and secondary schools across the State during the recruitment process of 2016.Several persons including the former education minister Partha Chatterjee and Trinamool Congress (TMC) party MLAs Manik Bhattacharya and Jiban vKrishna Saha are behind bars for their alleged involvement in the scam along with suspended TMC leaders like Santanu Kundu and Kuntal Ghosh.
TAGS: Calcutta High Court West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) recruitment process cancellation salary return re-evaluation Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
