‘Won’t sit for fresh selection exam’: Agitating teachers tell West Bengal govt | Kolkata

West Bengal government schoolteachers, who lost their jobs because of the Supreme Court’s April 3 order in the bribe-for-employment case, told the state on Monday that they will not appear for a fresh selection test as directed by the top court.

The selection process must start by May 31, the court had ruled.

“We told the principal secretary and other officials of the education department that we will not sit for a selection test again. Many among us are ailing. There are a few cancer patients as well. They cannot appear for tests. The principal secretary said he cannot help because nobody is above the Supreme Court,” Brindaban Ghosh, who attended the meeting along with six other teachers, told the media.

This was the first meeting between the government and the agitating teachers since the May 15 clash between protesters and police outside the Salt Lake office of the education department.

“None of us is tainted. We demanded a meeting with either chief minister Mamata Banerjee or education minister Bratya Basu but that didn’t happen. The bureaucrats did not have the answers to many of our questions. We requested them to find a way so that the recruitment can take place bypassing the test,” Ghosh said.

Vinod Kumar, the principal secretary of the education department, did not comment on the demand the agitators raised on Monday.

The appointments of all 25,752 schoolteachers and non-teaching staff from the 2016 panel were cancelled by the Supreme Court on April 3 after a long hearing in the bribe-for-job case. Many of them have been staging an agitation since early May.

“How can a government comment on a demand that challenges the Supreme Court’s order. The state has filed a review petition before the Supreme Court. The agitators were informed about its details,” an official said requesting anonymity.

The appointments were first cancelled by the Calcutta high court in 2023, following which the state challenged the order in the Supreme Court.

On April 3, the division bench of Chief Justice of India scrapped the appointments of all 2016-batch schoolteachers and Group-C and D staff saying there was no way to segregate the tainted from the non-tainted.

On an appeal by the state, the top court allowed the apparently non-tainted teachers to continue in service until December 31. The court also directed the state to start a fresh recruitment process for them by May 31 and complete it in three months.

The alleged scam hit the headlines in May 2022 when the Calcutta high court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the appointment of non-teaching staff (Group C and D) and teaching staff by the West Bengal School Service Commission and the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education between 2014 and 2021 when Partha Chatterjee was education minister. Many appointees allegedly paid bribes in the range of ₹5-15 lakh to get jobs after failing the selection tests.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), which started a parallel probe, arrested Chatterjee in July 2022. The ED filed charges against him, ex-primary education board president and legislator Manik Bhattacharya and 52 others in January this year.