New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would consider whether to cancel the entire selection process to invalidate the appointment of 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff in government and aided schools in West Bengal or decide specific cases of wrongful employment. A bench comprising Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar, which is seized of 118 petitions on the issue, said it could not hear them due to paucity of time.
The bench therefore listed the pleas including the one filed by the West Bengal government challenging the Calcutta High Court judgement on December 19. The CJI said the hearing would be narrowed down to consider whether to cancel the entire selection process, or be confined to hear specific ones where persons were employed wrongfully.
"There is a very limited issue - this is with regards to whether the entire examination should have been cancelled or in case we were able to identify the candidates who got it wrongly,” the CJI said, adding the issue should not be complicated. The Calcutta High Court invalidated the appointment of 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff in government and aided schools in West Bengal through the 2016 SSC recruitment process finding irregularities with OMR sheets. It had ordered the state government authorities to conduct fresh examinations.
On July 16, the top court granted a final opportunity to the parties to file responses to the pleas challenging the Calcutta High Court order. The bench also issued a slew of procedural directions and appointed four lawyers as nodal counsel while asking them to file a common compilation in electronic form after getting details from the lawyers of various parties.
It had appointed advocates Astha Sharma, who represents the state government, Shalini Kaul, Partha Chatterjee and Shekhar Kumar as nodal counsel. The top court on May 7 granted a major relief to teachers and non-teaching staff of West Bengal whose services were invalidated by the high court on the grounds of irregularities in the appointment process.
It, however, permitted the CBI to continue with its probe and said it could even investigate members of the state cabinet if required. While granting the relief on the pleas, the bench asked the CBI to not take any precipitative action like any arrest of any suspect during its investigation.
The top court, however, had made it clear that the teachers and non-teaching staff of the state, whose appointments were cancelled by the high court, would have to refund the salaries and other emoluments if it reached the conclusion that their recruitment was illegal.
The issue meriting a closer analysis, it said, was whether the tainted appointments could be segregated. If it was possible then it would be wrong to set aside the entirety of the process, the bench had said. The top court had also termed the alleged recruitment scam in the state as "systemic fraud" and said the state authorities were duty-bound to maintain the digitised records pertaining to the appointment of 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff.
"Public job is so scarce... Nothing remains if the faith of the public goes. This is systemic fraud. Public jobs are extremely scarce today and are looked at for social mobility. The top court had also told said, "What remains in the system if their appointments are also maligned? People will lose faith, how do you countenance this."
Besides cancelling the appointments, the Calcutta High Court had also directed the CBI to probe into the appointment process and submit a report in three months. Over 23 lakh candidates had appeared for the state level selection test (SLST)-2016 for 24,640 vacant posts. A total of 25,753 appointment letters were issued against 24,640 vacancies.
The high court had instructed those appointed outside the officially available 24,640 vacancies or after the expiry of the official recruitment date, besides those who submitted blank OMR sheets but obtained appointments to return all remunerations and benefits received by them with 12 per cent per annum interest within four weeks.
