Bengal Recruitment Scam: Salaries Drawn by ‘Tainted’ Candidates Without Assuming Posts

Amid ongoing protests from both legitimate and allegedly corrupt candidates who lost teaching and non-teaching jobs in West Bengal’s state-run schools after a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, a new issue of irregularities has emerged.

The controversy involves some of the “tainted” candidates flagged by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC), who are recorded as “non-joined” in the state education department’s files — meaning they were supposedly appointed but never actually began work.

This has raised a serious question: if these individuals were officially marked as not having joined, how were they able to draw salaries for years?

Sources within the education department suggested that a technical error may have occurred, with records not being updated after these individuals assumed their roles. An official mentioned that the WBSSC is currently working with the education department to resolve this discrepancy.

The exact number of such cases has not yet been disclosed, but insiders say the revelation has caused significant concern within the department.Meanwhile, opposition parties have seized on the situation, claiming it further exposes deep-rooted corruption throughout the school recruitment process.

Since Thursday afternoon, protests have intensified, with two separate groups — the allegedly “tainted” and the “genuine” candidates — holding sit-in demonstrations outside the WBSSC office.

The “genuine” candidates are demanding the immediate release of a clear list distinguishing them from the “tainted” ones. In contrast, many of the accused claim they were wrongly labeled due to technical faults in their optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets.

Earlier this month, a Supreme Court bench consisting of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar upheld a previous ruling by the Calcutta High Court, which had annulled the WBSSC’s 2016 panel of 25,753 appointments.The apex court agreed with the High Court’s conclusion that the entire recruitment list needed cancellation because the state government and WBSSC failed to properly separate the legitimate candidates from those who had secured jobs through bribery.