SSC scam: Axed teachers meet education minister Bratya Basu; to continue sit-in
Telegraph | 3 May 2025
Teachers barred from returning to school met education
minister Bratya Basu at Bikash Bhavan on Friday. The teachers demanded they be
allowed to go to school and draw salaries till December 31, along the lines of
the temporary relief extended to those “not specifically found tainted”.
Education department sources said Basu heard the teachers out and asked them to
meet him again on Monday. Calls and text messages to Basu went unanswered on
Friday evening.
A department official said a delegation of four sacked teachers
met Basu and asked him on what basis they had been excluded from the list of
segregated teachers allowed to return to school, since the Supreme Court had
refused to take cognisance of the CBI’s report.
The school service commission has
excluded 1,804 teachers from a pool of 17,206 teachers, after the apex court on
April 17 ruled on a plea by the state secondary board that only those “not
found specifically tainted” could go back to school till December.
SSC
chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar was at Friday’s meeting.
Kamalesh Kapat, a
delegation member, said: “We told the minister that we could not figure out why
we have been categorised as tainted. The CBI has mentioned that our case comes
under the OMR dispute category. But the Supreme Court in its April 3 order has
not taken cognisance of the CBI report. Then why have we been stopped from
returning to school? Why has our salary been stopped?”
Another teacher of the
delegation said the apex court’s April 3 order said the SSC argued that the
selection process should not be annulled because the data retrieved from the
CBI, including scanned mirror copies of OMR sheets, “allows segregation of
candidates”.
The teacher said: “We told the minister that the same court said
in its April 3 order they may have accepted this argument if the SSC had the
original physical OMRs or mirror copies. This means the court did not give
credence to the scanned images retrieved by the CBI. Then, why have we been
identified as tainted?”
A department official said Basu told the delegation the
state government would soon file a review petition against the April 3 order.
The teachers said they would continue their sit-in outside the SSC office in
Salt Lake till their demands are met.