‘Can’t fund CBI’s search for OMR sheet data’

Kolkata: The West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE), on Thursday, filed an application in Calcutta High Court, citing its inability to foot the bill for Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) quest to recover the data concerning the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets used in the written examination for the recruitment of primary teachers in state-run schools.

The Board, on Thursday, is learnt to have filed the application in the Division Bench of Justice Harish Tandon. It came to light that the Board claimed that it also informed the CBI of the same but the central probe agency is learnt to have said that no copy of it was served to them.

The CBI was earlier directed by the Single Bench of Justice Rajasekhar Mantha to consult and take help of experts from anywhere in the world, including private entities with expertise in the Information Technology sector, to retrieve the related data.

Justice Mantha had also directed that the entire cost for bearing the assistance of expert agencies should be borne by the WBBPE. On July 2, the CBI was directed to submit the original hard disc where the digitised copies of the OMR sheets, used in the written examinations for primary teachers’ recruitment, were stored but the central probe agency told the court that its officials were not in any position to submit the same

in the court.

It was then that Justice Mantha asked CBI to take help of IT experts as he observed that even if the hard disc was destroyed, the original data might have remained stored at the server of WBBPE.

The CBI in its report had stated that the data stored by an ADF Scanner was allegedly destroyed by Kaushik Majhi, a partner of S Basu and Company, who had supplied 8,000 OMR sheets to the Board. What is available with the company is the mirror image captured by a SEKONIC Scanner, data whereof is editable.