SSC protests: Teachers allow chairman, officials to leave after 40-hr siege
The Statesman | 24 April 2025
After a 40-hour siege at Acharya Sadan, West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) headquarters at Salt Lake, a section of protesting jobless teachers on Wednesday morning allowed Siddhartha Majumder, chairman of the WBSSC, and its other employees to leave.
The aggrieved teachers of the government-aided schools across the state have been organising protests in front of the Acharya Sadan building demanding the commission to release the list of tainted and untainted teachers along with OMR sheets of 22,000 candidates who had appeared in the recruitment tests conducted by the WBSSC in 2016 for the posts of assistant teachers and non-teaching staff.
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Mr Majumdar whom the protesters had gheraoed since Monday was scheduled to appear before the Calcutta High Court today in connection with a hearing related to the presentation of OMR sheets of the 2016 recruitment test.
The agitators, who launched the demonstration on 21 April, however, said their sit-in will continue till their demands are met by the school service commission.
Mr Majumdar told media he has returned home and will take rest for some time before attending the court proceedings as per schedule.
Chinmoy Mondal, one of the protesters and spokesperson of the Deserving Teachers Forum, said that the WBSSC chairman was allowed to leave because he had to be physically present at the High Court. “Our sit-in will continue as usual… and he will again be besieged once he returns to his office after the court proceedings. We still stick to our demand for publication of 22 lakh OMR sheets,” Mr Mondal said.
“Education minister Bratya Basu said on Tuesday that the list won’t be made public till the review petition is filed in the court. We will seek clarification on it from the chairman otherwise our movement would be intensified further,” he said.
Today, the high court heard a contempt petition against the West Bengal Department of School Education, claiming that it has not uploaded OMR sheets of 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staffers who lost their jobs following a Supreme Court judgment.
The high court wanted to know about what steps the state government has taken in connection with refunding the salary of the identified ineligible teachers.
The apex court in its judgment had directed the identified ineligible teachers to refund their salary.
The jobless teachers launched the indefinite sit-in protest in front of the WBSSC headquarters on 21 April, the day the commission promised to upload the list of tainted and eligible candidates but could not, citing legal issues.
A delegation of the teachers met the SSC chairman on Tuesday and held a discussion, which they termed “partially satisfactory”.