In a timely relief for the Trinamool Congress Government the Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed the April 21 Calcutta High Court order terminating the jobs of 25,753 school teachers and non-teaching staff and restrained the Central Bureau of Investigation from taking any coercive measure against the Mamata Banerjee Cabinet but not before lambasting the State for perpetrating a “systematic fraud” in conducting the recruitment process in 2016.

Saying that the recruitment authorities were duty-bound to maintain digitised records related to the appointment of 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff the Bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra delivered an interim order staying the Calcutta High Court verdict terminating about 26,000 jobs.

The Court also set aside the High Court order directing the terminated employees who had secured their employment by adopting unfair means to return the entire salary they had drawn since the date of joining with 12 percent interest.

Insofar as the State Cabinet is concerned the High Court had directed the CBI to bring its

members under investigation and do so by taking the suspects in custody if required. The Apex Court put a stay on that order too. The Supreme Court however allowed the CBI to continue its investigation into the Bengal teacher recruitment scam case. 

The case would be heard post summer vacation on July 16 post, sources in the bar said. The case arose out the “school jobs for cash scam", and had besides seeing a number of TMC ministers and MLAs going to jail put the entire party on a sticky wicket in the election year.

While the sacked teachers heaved a sigh of relief with many of them saying, “this order will for the time restore not only our lost honour but also give a relief financially,” asking, “why we who had taken our exams cleanly should suffer for the crime committed by unscrupulous people.”

Bengal Minister Chandrima Bhattacharya on other hand said that “truth finally prevails and it has prevailed … the hawks that were making merry by eating away the jobs of common people have been exposed now.”

However, Calcutta High Court advocate Srinjay Sengupta said, “it is just a stay and not the final

verdict … even the School Servicer Commission has conceded to the fact that there has been large-scale corruption in the recruitment process … both the High Court and the Supreme Court have seen that prima facie … no one wants the jobs of the honest candidates to go but it the dishonest appointees have to be found out in the larger public and students’ interest and the interest of those candidates who had appeared in the exams, got empanelled but were not considered because those who purchased the jobs by greasing the palms of the people in power by-passed them.”