Bengal school job case: CBI grilling staff of OMR sheet producing agency

Kolkata, July 16 (IANS) CBI officials on Tuesday began interrogation of the employees of S Basu & Company, the outsourced agency responsible for providing and preserving the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets used in the examination for recruitment of teachers in West Bengal government schools in 2017.

This follows the seizure of 36 electronic gadgets including two servers of S Basu & Company by the CBI last week.

The central agency has sent the two servers to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) at Hyderabad for recovering the data of OMR sheets deleted from the servers.

Sources said in the meantime parallel interrogation of some present and former employees of the outsourced agency is necessary to get a clear picture of the chain of command in the conspiracy to destroy OMR sheet data.

The CBI is interrogating the employees to find out if the OMR sheet data was simply deleted or first tampered with and then deleted, sources said.

On July 5, the Calcutta High Court’s single- judge Bench of Justice Mantha directed the CBI officials to take help of independent software and cyber experts to recover the OMR sheet data.

Thereafter, the CBI officials accompanied by two IT experts conducted raids for three consecutive days last week and seized 36 electronic data gadgets including two servers.

In the meantime, on July 9, the counsel of West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) informed Justice Mantha’s Bench that the OMR sheets used in the written examination in 2017 were destroyed on the instructions of the Trinamool Congress legislator and former WBBPE Chairman Manik Bhattacharya.