Bengal | 500 jobless school teachers continue dharna, seek inclusion of names on untainted candidates’ list

Kolkata: Over 500 of the nearly 26,000 school employees rendered jobless following a Supreme Court order continued their sit-in near the headquarters of the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) on Tuesday, protesting the omission of their names from the list of "untainted" teachers.

The SSC, their recruiter, on Monday, sent an amended list of "eligible" teachers to the district inspectors (DIs) of schools across the state, adding 300 more names omitted due to "human error".

The first list containing around 15,400 names, released on April 23, prompted many protesting teachers to return to work, though at least 500 others continued their sit-in for the sixth consecutive day.

The eligible teachers, whose names were forwarded to the DI office, were described as "not specifically tainted", in the WBSSC parlance.

The untainted teachers, whose names were sent to the DI office by SSC, would be able to continue their services until December 31 as directed by the Supreme Court in an order on April 17.

Anuj Kar, a member of the United Teaching and Non-Teaching Forum, called this "discriminatory", favouring those associated with another organisation, the Deserving Teachers Rights Forum.

"We demand immediate posting of OMR sheets of every candidate in the 2016 test on the SSC website which will establish beyond doubt that we are not tainted. Otherwise, we demand inclusion of our names in the list prepared by SSC and send it to DI offices," Kar said.

Kar and other protesters of the forum refused to let officials of SSC leave the premises since Monday, demanding the presence of Chairman Siddhartha Majumdar at the office.

Majumdar, after being confined within the office by another group of protestors belonging to the Deserving Teachers Forum on April 21-22, was allowed to leave the SSC office on April 23 to attend the ongoing hearing of the 2016 SSC Test OMR Sheet case at Calcutta High Court and on health ground due to his age.

In another development, four non-teaching school staff, whose jobs were annulled among the 25,753, have been on hunger strike at the WBSSC office premises for the past five days.

They had been refusing solid foods but taking liquid ones at the request of the administration.

"We will continue with our protest till the Group C and Group D employees are also brought under tainted/untainted lists. The Rs 25,000 monthly allowance for Group C and Rs 20,000 for Group D employees until December 31 is simply not enough," one of the non-teaching protestors Satyajit Dhar said.

The Deserving Teachers Rights Forum which had initially held the protests outside the SSC office for three days from April 21-23 is no longer present before the SSC office as most of its members have already gone back to schools to take classes while a section is holding a sit-in at Esplanade.

The Supreme Court on April 3 upheld a 2024 Calcutta High Court judgment annulling the recruitment of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff appointed through the 2016 School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment drive, terming the entire selection process "vitiated and tainted".

Those who were rendered jobless claimed that the reason behind their plight was the inability of the SSC to differentiate between the candidates who secured employment through fraudulent means and those who did not.