The West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) is ready to publish the list of eligible and ineligible candidates as well as the digital mirror images of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets of all 22 lakh candidates, who appeared for the 2016 exams, with appropriate legal advice, Education Minister Bratya Basu said Friday.
A 13-member delegation of the eligible teachers, who lost their jobs, attended an almost three hour meeting with Basu, SSC chairman Siddhartha Majumder, West Bengal Board of Secondary Education President Ramanuj Ganguly and other officials of the school education department, at Bikash Bhavan, the state education department headquarter in Salt Lake.
The eligible candidates who lost their jobs after the Supreme Court verdict on SLST-2016, presented their demands and the SSC agreed to prepare a list of eligible and ineligible candidates and also publish the list on April 21.
However, Basu and the SSC said that they will take ‘legal advice’ before publishing the list. “They appealed many things to us. We have no basic difference with their demands. However, the Supreme Court gave an order and we can’t violate that. So, without legal advice we cannot do anything,” Basu said after the meeting.
The announcement comes days after teachers and non-teaching staff held a mega protest rally this week. Earlier on Friday, the eligible teachers of SLST-2016 marched towards the SSC office and began a protest in front of the office.
Maintaining that the teachers were able to put forward all their demands during the meeting, Tanmay Naskar, on behalf of the teachers, said, “We placed all our demands and the government heard all our demands peacefully. But, we are not willing to be satisfied until our demands are fulfilled. We will be satisfied after the government publishes the list of eligible and illegible candidates. We will continue our movement till then.”
Basu stated that though the SSC does not retain digital images of the OMR sheets in question, it possesses copies of those sheets retrieved by the CBI during its course of investigation, and which the agency later shared with the Commission. “We have no problem to announce the list of eligible and illegible candidates and also the mirror images which we got from the CBI. We said to the representatives of the teachers that we will upload those lists after getting proper legal advice,” the minister further said.
“If there are no legal hurdles, we should be able to complete the task within two weeks,” Basu said, while confirming that the prospective deadline for publication is April 21.
Basu further said, “Today’s meeting was a follow-up to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s assurance to teachers…earlier this week. We’ll provide all legal protection, assistance to teachers who unfairly lost their jobs.”
A Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar had on April 3 upheld the Calcutta High Court’s verdict annulling the appointment of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff terming the entire selection process “vitiated and tainted”.
It had ordered the TMC government to initiate a fresh selection process.