On Friday, CBI officers continued their search operations at a city-based private company’s premises as part of their investigation into alleged irregularities in a school recruitment scam, an official reported.

During the search at M/s. S Basu Roy and Co. in the Southern Avenue area, CBI officers seized two servers and hard disks. The primary objective was to locate digital backups of the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets used in recruitment tests.

The search team consisted of six officers and two cybercrime experts. “The seized servers and hard disks will undergo forensic tests to retrieve data. Our officers are specifically looking for digital copies of the OMR sheets if they had been stored as backups,” the official said.

Last week, the Calcutta High Court directed the CBI to diligently trace and retrieve the original or destroyed servers, disks, or other storage media containing scanned OMR sheets from the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) conducted in 2014.

The court also instructed the CBI to seek assistance from expert public or private organizations such as NIC, WIPRO, TCS, INFOSYS, etc., to determine whether the existing servers, hard disks, and computers belonging to M/s. S Basu Roy and Co., which was allegedly outsourced some work for the TET examination process, or the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) contain any digital traces of the scanned original OMR sheets from TET 2014.

It mandated that the costs incurred by these expert agencies would be borne by WBBPE upon CBI’s request. The court observed that once a digital footprint is created, it can always be retrieved. The case is scheduled for another hearing on August 23.

Source: PTI

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