New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notices to the Bengal government, the school service commission, and others in response to a petition filed by a group of "untainted teachers" challenging the state’s recruitment rules as “whimsical, arbitrary, and illegal”.
A bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and Aravind Kumar sought responses from the concerned authorities and tentatively scheduled the next hearing for September 9.
The petition challenges the Calcutta High Court’s July 16 order that declined to entertain objections to the recruitment rules for 2025.
The petitioners alleged that the revised rules altered the evaluation criteria from the 2016 recruitment process. “...academic marks of the written test as well as interview as well as professional test have... totally changed,” the petition stated.
The petition raised concerns over OBC reservations, stating that the validity of some OBC certificates remains under challenge, and the rules fail to clarify whether such candidates remain eligible. It also contended that the recruitment notification does not specify category-wise vacancies, making it unclear how many posts are available per subject or reservation category — unlike in 2016, when vacancies were declared as per the reservation roster.
The petitioners state that the new rules do not exclude those found to be “specifically tainted in the 2016 process”. It also says that the recruitment rules were published when the untainted teachers' review plea was pending before the Supreme Court.