E-governance: State to fully digitise primary teacher recruitments
Kolkata: In a bid to ensure complete transparency, speed and accountability, the Bengal government plans to fully digitise recruitment drives conducted by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) as part of its e-governance solution.
Sources confirmed that the state government has invited bids to hire an agency that will provide a full-fledged e-governance solution for recruitment drives conducted by WBBPE. The initiative marks a major step towards the complete digitalisation of the state’s primary teacher recruitment process
Officials explained that while previous recruitment cycles had limited online components—such as web-based applications and admit card downloads—several critical stages, including evaluation, grievance handling and record preservation, were still managed manually or through disconnected systems. The new initiative seeks to integrate all these operations into a single, automated digital framework, ensuring that the entire recruitment cycle can be conducted, monitored and audited online.
According to sources, the selected agency will design and manage an end-to-end recruitment platform covering online registration, payment gateways, OMR-based examination management, result processing and interview data capture. It will also feature an Online Challenge Management System (OCMS) that will enable candidates to raise objections to answer keys or verify their recorded OMR responses through a secure portal, with proper payment and reconciliation mechanisms built in.
The system will be designed to handle around 10,000 concurrent users, with uptime requirements of up to 99.5 per cent for registration modules. All data generated during the recruitment process will be securely stored in a MeitY-approved cloud environment, with provision for long-term archival.
The selected agency will also be required to provide support for authenticating digital records under Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, ensuring that the data can stand legal scrutiny if required in court. The move comes in the backdrop of judicial scrutiny over irregularities in school recruitment, including the Calcutta High Court’s observations in the SSC recruitment scam case, stressing the need for tamper-proof systems. Officials said the initiative aims to make teacher recruitment faster, more transparent and fully verifiable.
