Recruitment scam: WBSSC announces new deadline for submission of segregated list

Kolkata, April 22 (IANS) Amid continuing agitation outside the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) office by job losers (the teaching and non-teaching staff) of state-run schools demanding publication of lists segregating the "genuine" and "tainted" candidates, the commission on Tuesday afternoon has set a new deadline for the same.

However, the new deadline is not regarding the publication of the segregated lists. The commission has now proposed to submit the segregated lists to the state Education Department by April 30.

The commission will send three separate lists to the state Education Department. The first list will be of those who are "genuine" beyond doubt, and the second will be of those who are "tainted" beyond doubt.

At the same time, commission insiders said, the third list will be of those in whose cases optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets had some technical errors.

The commission has also instructed the different district inspectors of schools to immediately start the process of preparing these three lists in their respective districts.

The previous deadline to publish the segregated list was Monday. However, as the commission failed to do so, the "genuine" candidates started a sit-in demonstration outside the WBSSC office from Monday evening, which is continuing till now.

On Tuesday, state Education Minister Bratya Basu justified the commission's decision not to publish the segregated list.

He said the Supreme Court never asked the commission to publish the list.

On Tuesday, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also questioned why the job losers were now insisting on the publication of lists by the commission, segregating the "genuine" and "tainted" candidates.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court 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 panel for 2016 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

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