“They must give us a job… I am not a tainted candidate. I am the only breadwinner of my family. I have aged parents, a wife and a one-year-old child. What will I feed them now?” Surojit Malakar, a group D non-teaching staff member in Bardhaman, said as he tried to enter Netaji Indoor Stadium, the venue of CM Mamata Banerjee’s interaction with teachers affected by the Supreme Court’s judgment.
Krishnendu Mukherjee, a teacher at Panchanantala High School in Katwa told The Indian Express, “Just for some tainted candidates, the entire panel has to suffer. Why will our jobs have to go too? How is it possible to give a re-examination?”
“I thought that the tainted candidates would get removed, but we got punished,” said Tanaya Das, a teacher at the Serampore High School.
“We are candidates who are genuine… We never gave money. I did not get a pass; does that mean that I am tainted? How are they deciding who is tainted and who is not — how can they issue such passes?” Meanwhile, Bapi Mondol, a teacher of a school at Paschim Medinipur, told The Indian Express after the meeting, “I am jobless. My four-year-old daughter said, ‘I will not go to school as you will not be able to pay my fees.’ I am in complete darkness now.”
Bapan Jana, who lost his job, said, “How could the CM say that we have to do voluntary work? She gave no clarity to us about the future. The CM said she will ask the SC for the list (of who was genuine)… What was she doing for so long? Is this a joke?”
The Calcutta High Court’s division bench of Justice Soumen Sen and Justice Smita Das De have recused themselves from an ongoing state primary teacher recruitment corruption case, with Justice Sen citing “personal reasons”.
This comes days after a Supreme Court verdict on April 4 led to the dismissal of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff in state-run and state-aided schools in West Bengal.
The court’s Chief Justice TS Sivagnanam will assign the primary teachers case to a new division bench. Incidentally, in May 2023, then Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta High Court had ordered the cancellation of the jobs of 32,000 primary teachers. The state had appealed to a division bench of Justice Subrata Talukdar and Justice Supratim Bhattacharya against that order at the time.
The plaintiffs claimed that after the publication of the list with the division of marks as per the court’s order, it was found that many untrained candidates got job recommendation letters despite getting lower marks than them in that list.
In 2016, 42,500 people were appointed to state-run primary schools. Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay had ordered the cancellation of the jobs of 32,000 untrained primary teachers. The West Bengal Board of Primary Education claimed that no teacher was untrained. Teachers whose jobs were cancelled had taken to the streets to protest.