Sacked teachers barred from returning to school met the school service commission chairperson on Tuesday evening to demand that they be allowed to work until December and draw their salaries.
The sacked teachers identified as tainted met SSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar at Bikash Bhavan, the education secretariat.
Instead of going to the SSC headquarters, Acharya Sadan, Majumdar has been working out of Bikash Bhavan because the “tainted” teachers had laid siege to the commission office since Friday.
After the talks with Majumdar on Tuesday evening, the protesting teachers said they would not block the SSC office anymore.
However, they would carry on with a sit-in demonstration, they said.
“We had fruitful discussions with the SSC chairperson. Although we cannot divulge details of what transpired at the meeting, we have decided to call off the blockade at the SSC office. However, our sit-in will go on,” said Kamalesh Kapat, a spokesperson for the United Teaching and Non-teaching Forum.
The forum represents 1,804 teachers who have been excluded by the SSC from the list of 17,206 teachers following complaints of irregularities in their appointment.
The state government has allowed only 15,403 teachers identified as “not specifically found to be tainted” to return to schools until the end of December and draw salaries.
Although the state secondary education board in its miscellaneous petition before the Supreme Court pleaded that all the 17,206 teachers be allowed to return to school so students did not suffer in the ongoing academic year, the court only allowed the segregated 15,403 teachers to return to work for the time being.
The miscellaneous petition followed the Supreme Court’s April 3 order, which terminated the jobs of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff at the secondary and higher secondary levels of government-aided schools because the entire selection process held in 2016 by the SSC was “vitiated” and “beyond redemption”.
Sources in the education department said that the tainted teachers told the SSC chairperson that it was not clear why they had been excluded from the list that the board had filed in its miscellaneous petition before the apex court.
“They told the SSC chairperson that the Supreme Court did not accept the CBI’s report on recovering the scanned images because the data was retrieved from a third party, M/S Nysa Ltd. The court in its order said they could accept the commission’s contention of segregating genuine
candidates from the fraudulently recruited ones if the commission had preserved physical copies of the OMR sheets or made a record of the scanned images. Since that has not happened, they wanted to know on what basis they have been identified as tainted,” said an official of the education department.
When contacted, SSC chairperson Majumdar refused to comment.
Sources in the commission said the chairperson told the delegation of teachers that their contention would be mentioned in the review petition that the education department is scheduled to file in the Supreme Court on Friday.