The Supreme Court on Monday (February 10) reserved its verdict on multiple petitions challenging the Calcutta High Court’s decision to annul over 25,000 teaching and non-teaching appointments made by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) in 2016.

A bench comprising Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar heard the matter, which stems from the widely publicized cash-for-jobs recruitment scam.

During the hearing, the CJI expressed concerns over the authenticity of the scanned OMR sheet data used to match results in the WBSSC server, Live Law reported.

The court questioned whether the retrieved data—originally sourced from a private company called NYSA employee Pankaj Bansal—could be considered the only reliable reference.

“See the difficulty is this- we don't have the original mark sheets- CBI says that the data with Bansal matches with the SSC server data- but still we cannot authenticate and vouch for, that this is the original one because in the absence of the original mark sheets- the suspicion is now today even to the extent whether these are the original marksheets of the candidates? Because there is so much (inaudible) done on such a large scale, it's impossible to authenticate that," the CJI was quoted by Live Law as saying.

Previously, the court had raised doubts about whether the original OMR sheets, after being collected from candidates, remained untampered before being scanned.

The WBSSC had admitted to destroying these original sheets after one year, as per exam rules.