Relief for West Bengal Govt in teachers’ job case

Facing corruption charges for years in every field of administration, the Mamata Banerjee Government on Wednesday got a big relief — particularly in an election year — with a Division Bench of Calcutta High Court setting aside a previous single Bench order annulling appointments of 32,000 primary school teachers.

These teachers were recruited through the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) of 2014.

The exams had seen then Education Minister Partha Chatterjee, MLA and TET Chairman Manik Bhattacharya and several senior Government employees, including a sitting Vice Chancellor and a Chairman of West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, going to jail.

The Division Bench of Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty held that, as corruption and irregularities had not been proved against in all the recruitments, it would not be fair to cancel the entire panel, throwing 32,000 teachers off jobs after nine years of service, causing great hardships to them and their families.

The Court, however, would not quash the investigation orders or rule that no corruption had taken place in the appointment process.

It did not touch the previous orders of investigation conducted by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation. 

The CBI had initially identified 264 appointments in which irregularities took place, following which the names of another 96 teachers came under the agency’s scanner but there was no evidence that all the candidates obtained their jobs through illegal means, the Court observed, adding the entire selection process cannot be cancelled.

A single Bench of then Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay had terminated the appointments of these 32,000 primary teachers in 2023.

While senior advocate and Trinamool Congress MP, Kalyan Banerjee, appearing on behalf of the petitioners, later said that the “entire case was politically motivated … it being the product of a conspiracy hatched by the BJP and the CPI(M),” BJP leader and counsel Tarunjyoti Tewari said that the order would be challenged in the Supreme Court. “We respect the Court and the order but an SLP will be preferred in the Supreme Court,” he said.

Incidentally, in a similar instance case concerning 26,000 teachers and school staff, the Supreme Court had earlier this year cancelled the entire panel of the ‘successful’ candidates after eight years of service and ordered a fresh examination to be conducted by the School Service Commission.