Bengal teachers on warpath after SSC fails to publish ‘deserving’ list, HC to hear plea on April 23

Kolkata: Chaos erupted outside Acharya Sadan, the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) headquarters, on Monday evening after the recruitment body failed to release, by the 6 pm deadline set by the agitating teachers, the list of 2016 SSC qualifiers whose jobs were annulled by the Supreme Court.

Alleging that they have run out of patience, the protestors clashed with the police and tried to breach barricades to lay siege to the SSC office, after news trickled out that the commission considers that only the first three of the 12 rounds of counselling held for the now-invalidated teachers are valid, implying names of teachers recruited from the fourth round would not feature in the list of ‘deserving’ candidates.

The Calcutta High Court also said it will on Wednesday hear 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 staff who lost their jobs following the judgment.

Besides putting up a gherao to stop SSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar and other staff from leaving the building, the agitating teachers also laid siege before the adjacent Derozio Bhavan, the office of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, to prevent the board president Ramanuj Ganguly from leaving office.

A 13-member delegation from the agitating teachers was closeted in a meeting with the Majumdar since 4.30 pm which ran for several hours with no resolution of ending the deadlock in sight.

Agitated teachers, numbering about 2,000, blocked roads before the SSC office and announced their intention to stay put till the commission published the list as promised.

“We received information from our representatives inside that the SSC is planning to upload the list of untainted candidates up to the third counselling since they claim most of the tainted recruitments took place in the next nine rounds in upper classes of secondary and higher secondary level,” Suman Biswas, an agitating teacher, said.

“This is grossly unfair and amounts to a further attempt by the commission to obliterate transparency. We will not accept this and will remain here until the complete list of untainted candidates from all counselling sessions along with certified OMRs is presented to us,” he added.

Prafulla Bera, a school teacher from Purba Medinipur district, alleged that the SSC was still trying to shield the tainted candidates and present a distorted picture before the court.

“What about the tainted candidates who are there in the first three and the remaining counselling rounds? Where is that list?” Bera asked.

The agitating teachers also demanded the resignation of the SSC chairman and state Education Minister Bratya Basu.

When contacted by PTI, Majumdar said, "Please wait for some time. I will come up with the outcome of today's discussion shortly." Earlier in the day, hundreds of teaching and non-teaching staff, whose appointments were invalidated by the Supreme Court, staged a protest march to the SSC office demanding the immediate publication of the list of candidates who had qualified in the 2016 SSC recruitment test.

The education minister had on April 11 said the WBSSC would publish the complete list of untainted and tainted candidates separately on its website within two weeks.

A spokesperson for the Deserving Teachers Rights Forum also claimed that during discussions, WBSSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar and Basu had promised the list would be uploaded by April 21.

The protestors marched from Karunamoyee Central Park to Acharya Bhavan — the WBSSC headquarters at Wipro Crossing — before launching a sit-in, reiterating their demand that the promised list must be published by the stated deadline of 6 pm.

The Supreme Court, in its April 3 verdict, declared the entire 2016 recruitment panel created by the SSC as null and void, citing widespread irregularities.

The ruling led to the termination of around 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staff from state-run and state-aided schools across West Bengal.