The names of some of the protest leaders among sacked teachers who did not feature among those being allowed to work till December have been included in an updated list.
The district inspectors of schools (DIs) on Monday started sending the revised list, enabling the new additions to return to school and draw their salaries until December 31.
When the school service commission (SSC) came out with a list of 15,403 teachers last week, Chinmoy Mandal, a joint convener of the Deserving Teachers’ Rights Forum, the platform that led the protests demanding a segregation of the sacked teachers, was missing.
The names of many other members of the forum also did not feature on the list.
That was embarrassing for the forum as many started doubting whether the office-bearers of the platform were among the tainted teachers who have been barred from returning to schools and whose salaries have been stopped.
The updated list on Monday included 200 new names, said sources in the commission.
“Around 150 more names will be included shortly. Before updating the list, some names had to be dropped. The inclusion and exclusion of names will not impact the total number of teachers (15,403) found to be not specifically tainted,” said a source.
Metro reported on April 27 that the commissioner of school education had sent the district inspectors of schools in six districts more names of sacked teachers who cannot return to school.
The names had been “inadvertently” included in the list drawn up by the commission last week.
A school education department official said some lapses had occurred while drawing up the list on April 22, and the lapses have been corrected with the inclusion of names.
“Chinmoy Mandal’s name did not feature on the first list because he first joined a school in Calcutta in 2019 and was then transferred to a school in Halisahar, North 24-Parganas, in 2021. This inter-district transfer was not updated in our records, and so his name was initially missing,” an official said.
“Many names had been omitted because of similar lapses,” the official said.
The SSC drew up the list of “not specifically found to be tainted” teachers in pursuance of the Supreme Court’s April 17 order, accepting the plea of the state secondary education board to let such teachers continue till the end of the academic year so that students were not affected.
Chinmoy Mandal said: “I went to my school, Halishahar Adarsha Vidyamandir, on Monday after my name was included. But what we have received is a temporary relief, and our fight to get reinstated in schools till the age of retirement (60 years) continues. We will soon file a review petition before the Supreme Court, challenging the apex court’s April 3 order.”
On April 3, the Supreme Court terminated the jobs of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff working in the secondary and higher secondary levels of government-aided schools because it felt the entire recruitment process conducted by the SSC in 2016 was “vitiated” and “tainted beyond redemption”.