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Calcutta, Feb. 21: A division bench of Calcutta High Court today vacated the stay of a trial bench which had on February 13 passed an interim stay restraining the education department from continuing with the recruitment of teachers for 39,000 vacant posts till March 31.
Justice Debasish Kargupta of the high court, on February 13, had passed the interim order and directed the School Service Commission (SSC) to appoint a team of experts to examine the questions and answer scripts of the teachers’ eligibility test (TET), conducted on July 29 last year.
Some candidates had alleged that there were mistakes in the answers published along with the results.
Today, after vacating the interim stay, the division bench comprising Chief Justice A.K. Mishra and Justice Jaymalya Bagchi sent the matter before Justice Kargupta for disposal within five weeks.
Justice Kargupta’s order had followed petitions by 31 unsuccessful candidates of the July 29 examination. They had alleged that the answers — published by the department along with the results — to some of the multiple-choice questions in the TET were wrong.
Four answer options were provided for each question.
“We found that many answers, as issued by the authorities, were wrong. In some questions, two answers were marked as correct. In a few others, all four options were incorrect,” a petitioner had said.
Candidates appearing for the post of high school teachers have to take a two-phase examination — the TET and the final test.
The TET to recruit teachers to 14,000-odd schools was held on July 29 last year. The results were announced on December 12.
The department was preparing to hold the final test, the date for which is yet to be announced. But Justice Kargupta’s interim order prevented the department from taking any further step till March 31.
After the division bench’s order today, the department has no bar to proceed with the recruitment process.
Challenging the validity of Justice Kargupta’s interim order, the SSC lawyer Subrata Talukdar, said: “The posts of nearly 50,000 school teachers are lying vacant for years. As a result, the students have been suffering badly. For the sake of better education in school, the division bench should vacate the interim order. The interim order is preventing the department from proceeding further.”
The petitioner candidates, in their plea before Justice Kargupta, had said the answers provided in the TET for three papers — Bengali, English and child development — were wrong.
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