School Work Case: WBBPE asks HC to challenge order to cover IT experts’ employment costs

Kolkata, July 25 (IANS): The West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) on Thursday afternoon moved the Calcutta High Court seeking an appeal against its earlier order to bear the cost of hiring IT experts to help the CBI recover deleted data from the optical character recognition (OMR) sheet.

OMR sheets were used during the written examination for recruitment of primary school teachers in schools run in West Bengal.

Earlier, the board sent a note to the CBI stating that it was unable to cover the costs of hiring IT experts.

The World Bar Association of Judges (WBBPE) had also approached a bench headed by Justice Harish Tandon, challenging the earlier order in the matter passed by a bench headed by Justice Rajasekhar Mantha on July 5.

Immediately after Justice Mantha issued the order, CBI officials sought help from independent cyber experts and conducted a series of raids at the office of S Basu Roy & Company, the agency responsible for supplying OMR sheets.

CBI officials seized 34 electronic gadgets from the office of S Basu Roy & Company.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the WBBPE informed Justice Mantha that the OMR sheets used in the written examinations of 2014, 2016 and 2017 were destroyed as per the unilateral instructions of Trinamool Congress legislator and former WBBPE president Manik Bhattacharya.