Bengal Recruitment Scandal: Tainted Candidates Receiving Salaries Without Joining
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Synopsis
Protests continue in Kolkata as candidates contesting teaching and non-teaching jobs in West Bengal raise concerns about irregularities in salary payments for non-joined candidates. The WBSSC faces scrutiny following a Supreme Court ruling that canceled a previous recruitment panel.
Key Takeaways
- Ongoing protests by both genuine and tainted candidates.
- Irregularities in salary payments for non-joined candidates.
- WBSSC addressing record-keeping issues.
- Opposition parties alleging corruption in recruitment.
- Supreme Court ruling impacts 25,753 job positions.
Kolkata, April 25 (NationPress) Amid ongoing protests from both genuine and tainted candidates who missed out on teaching and non-teaching positions in state-run schools in West Bengal, following a recent Supreme Court ruling, a new issue of irregularity has emerged.
This irregularity involves a subset of the tainted candidates already flagged by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC). These individuals have been recorded as non-joined according to the school education department, indicating they have not commenced their duties despite having received appointments.
The inquiry now is — if these candidates are noted as non-joined in the state education department records, how have they been able to receive salaries for such an extended period?
Officials from the state education department suggested that there may have been a technical oversight in updating the records of these candidates post their actual joining at their assigned locations. WBSSC is reportedly working to clarify this situation with the state education department.
The exact number of these candidates has not yet been disclosed by the board, but sources indicate that this revelation has alarmed everyone within the department.
Opposition parties in the state have asserted that there is widespread corruption in all aspects of school job recruitment, and this represents a new dimension of the entire corrupt system.
From Thursday afternoon onward, protests and demonstrations regarding the loss of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching roles due to the Supreme Court ruling have taken a more complex turn, as the so-called tainted candidates initiated parallel sit-in protests outside the WBSSC office, in addition to the earlier protests by the genuine candidates.
On one side, the genuine candidates are demanding the prompt release of segregated lists identifying genuine and tainted candidates.
Conversely, the other group contends that their inclusion in the tainted list is due to technical mistakes in their optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets.
Earlier this month, a Supreme Court division bench led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar upheld a decision made by the Calcutta High Court last year, which annulled the WBSSC’s entire 2016 panel of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching appointments.
The apex court further affirmed the Calcutta High Court’s observation that the entire panel had to be cancelled due to the failure of both the state government and WBSSC to differentiate between genuine candidates and tainted individuals who were given jobs in exchange for money.
