Bengal school job case: CBI raids company providing OMR sheets

KOLKATA — The CBI officers escorted by two cyber and software experts on Tuesday raided the office of S. Basu Roy & Company here, the outsourced agency responsible for providing optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets for written examination for primary teacher recruitment in state-run schools.

Incidentally, on July 5 Calcutta High Court’s single-judge bench of Justice Rajasekhar Mantha had directed CBI to take the help of any specialised agency to recover the data regarding the OMR sheets.

Sources said the two cyber and software experts accompanying the raiding officials are independent experts and are not directly associated with the investigative agency.

Sources further said that the cyber experts accompanying the CBI officials will retrieve the data related to the OMRs used in the written examination for primary teachers’ recruitment in 2014 from the server or the computers of the office of the outsourced agency.

As per the directive of Justice Mantha, the entire cost for bearing the assistance of expert agencies is supposed to be borne by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE).

On July 2, Justice Mantha directed CBI to submit the original hard disc where the digitized copies of the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets used in the written examinations for primary teachers’ recruitment had been stored.

However, on July 5, the CBI counsel informed the court that their central agency officials were not in a position to submit the same to the court. Thereafter, Justice Mantha directed the central agency to take the help of expert agencies from anywhere in the world to recover that data.