Justice Rajasekhar Mantha of Calcutta High Court on Wednesday directed the Visva-Bharati vice-chancellor to set up an expert committee to find out whether 21 questions in the 2017 Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) to shortlist candidates for government-aided primary schools had any errors.

The order followed petitions by Riya Bandyopadhyay and other candidates who wrote the TET in January 2021 following a notification in 2017.

They alleged that as many as 21 questions in the test were erroneous and demanded full marks for those questions as compensation for attempting them.

Appearing for the petitioners, advocate Firdaus Shamim said his clients had first approached the primary education board with their grievance but that yielded no
result.

The primary education board’s lawyer said the allegations made by the petitioners were baseless.

Justice Mantha issued the order after hearing both sides.

The TET was held in 2021 when Manik Bhattacharya helmed the state primary education board.

Bhattacharya, a Trinamool MLA, was arrested by the CBI in October 2022 for his involvement in the alleged irregularities in the recruitment of teachers.

Mantha’s order came two days after a division bench of the same court cancelled
the appointments of over 25,700 teachers and non-teaching staff recruited to government-aided high schools through the 2016 state-level selection test, saying it was impossible to know which appointment was legal and which illegal.

A copy of the petition that this newspaper has seen lists the questions the candidates think were erroneous.

The petition talks about one allegedly wrong question: “It is important to mention here that question no. 119 has been wrongly printed in (some) Question booklets…. It is wrongly printed with + (Addition sign) instead of a division sign in the last part of the said equation and hence whole mathematics equation of the said question... has been altered and answer key supplied by the concerned respondents has become incorrect in nature as the whole mathematics equation has been altered because of misprint.”

Rap on ED

Appearing for the ED, advocate Dhiraj Trivedi on Wednesday informed the Calcutta High Court that the voice sample of Sujay Krishna Bhadra, known as Kalighat-er kaku, had matched but more time was needed to complete the investigation.

Justice Amrita Sinha told Trivedi: “The court cannot provide your client unlimited time for completion of the investigation... You will have to come with definite evidence.”