West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) on Friday cancelled the job recommendations issued to 775 candidates who were appointed as teachers in government-aided secondary schools, on the ground that they got their jobs allegedly through manipulation of marks.
Cancellation of job recommendation automatically leads to termination of service, said WBSSC officials.
The WBSSC move comes two days after a division bench of Calcutta High Court upheld the commission’s decision to initiate a process to cancel the appointment of these teachers.
The commission had on February 14 issued a notice saying the job recommendations of these candidates “shall be taken up for cancellation”. The notice followed an order from a single-judge bench of the high court to the commission to terminate the services of these teachers.
But the WBSSC stopped short of cancelling the job recommendations because the teachers moved a division bench of the high court. The bench had on Wednesday upheld the commission’s decision to initiate the process to cancel the recruitments.
The state secondary education board, which recruited the candidates following the WBSSC’s recommendations, issued a notice on Friday announcing that the “appointment of teachers stands cancelled”.
A commission official said they were planning to fill the vacant spots with waitlisted candidates.
An order issued by the chairperson of the commission on Friday said: “The recommendations of 775 candidates are hereby cancelled on and from today in exercise of the power conferred upon the Commission in terms of Rule 17 of the West Bengal School Service Commission (Selection for Appointment to the Post of Teachers for classes IX and X in Secondary and Higher Secondary Schools) Rules, 2016”.
The commission has uploaded on its website the names of the 775 candidates and the subjects for which they were recruited.
A probe revealed that the candidates’ marks in the selection test results, recorded on the commission’s server, did not match the responses captured on the OMR sheets, an official of the commission said.
Justice Biswasjit Basu of the high court had first identified 805 Class IX and X teachers for termination of service because they were recruited illegally and told the WBSSC to dismiss them.
In the first phase, the commission recommended the termination of 775 employees.
Siddhartha Majumdar, chairperson of the commission, told The Telegraph on March 1 that they would come up with another list of candidates in the next few days. He said on Friday the list would be put out after consulting legal experts.
